BLOG about PAINTING

Well, my last effort at painting with oils ended in a vicious migraine. So I took a break, researched things online, talked to the pros at Opus Framing, and decided to try to paint in oils but solvent-free. This entails using walnut oil for thinning and cleaning my brushes with kitchen oil instead of any petroleum-based solvent.

I've been at it again for a couple of days now. Of course, I have to get my momentum going again, which always takes a while.

This time, I'm using stars as a motif on which to build my quick-and-dirty paintings. Hmmm.

Interestingly, while I'm doing these semi-abstracts in the studio, I'm having two main thoughts:

1) This might be more productive in acrylic (?!) since I could then layer a lot more easily and faster.

2) I'm really hankering to get painting en plein air. First, however, since I'll need to use a solvent to do my underpainting out in the field, I'm going to have to build some kind of drying box where I can put the paintings to set up. SOON. It has to be soon.

A star: