Painting materials
Though I try to explain to people how I paint, it's always hard to explain without pictures, so occasionally I take photos of my paintings as I go along. Click on the thumbnails below for some step-by-step photographs of my paintings being created:
On this site:
Stage-by-stage:
Mrs Minotaur
Stage-by-stage:
Tattooed Fairy
Stage-by-stage:
Dinner for Two
On my page on Facebook:
Stage-by-stage:
Medusa's Hammock
Stage-by-stage:
The Frog Gimp
Stage-by-stage:
The Guilty Party
Stage-by-stage:
Mrs Minotaur
Stage-by-stage:
Tattooed Fairy
Stage-by-stage:
Dinner for Two
On my page on Facebook:
Stage-by-stage:
Medusa's Hammock
Stage-by-stage:
The Frog Gimp
Stage-by-stage:
The Guilty Party
Stage-by-stage:
Medusa's Hammock
Stage-by-stage:
The Frog Gimp
Stage-by-stage:
The Guilty Party
Gouache is a water-based painting medium, similar to watercolour but with a greater opacity. I like this medium a lot, though it appears to be always the poor relation of paints. You cannot blend gouache on the paper to create subtle modeling of tone as you can with oils or acrylic, and you cannot put wet paint down onto dry paint without to some shifting of the underneath layers of paint, but it does have one greatly flexible advantage which is the ability to remove layers of paint from the surface simply by wetting and blotting it. A process of ‘unpainting’, which can be used to reveal the paint below. It’s not a foolproof process – top layers of paint bleed into lower layers, and lower layers get washed off, but I like the murkiness of the image that this tends to create, and I can afterwards work up areas to give them detail and sharpness. I have photographed several paintings in stages, which makes more sense than explaining in words what I am trying to achieve - follow the links below to see a couple of examples:
Something I almost always make use of when creating a painting is the ability some of the pigments have of staining the paper. There is no sure way to guess the behavior of a particular colour in this way - you simply have to try them out first. After layering paint onto the surface and allowing it to dry I tend to wash most of it off again, often deliberately leaving a 'mucky' layer on top of the brighter cleaner colours, which can then be selectively removed to create highlights.
I realize, because I have tried to explain this to people, that it is difficult to understand what I mean, but I hope the sets of images above may go some way in illustrating the processes my paintings go through as I create them