Over the months I have been sharing thoughts on my painting methods.
Brushes are of central importance, and in this blog piece I go into detail about which I use, and the effects they create in my work.
I use ordinary paint brushes, of the sort you buy for household decorating, to paint most of my skies – simple 1”, 2”, 3”, and 4” brushes from the hardware department.
First, on the canvas, I lay down a layer of slightly thinned titanium white, (consistency of double cream). This is an important layer with several functions. First it softens the colours I use for the sky, enabling me to control how deep I go into those colours. Secondly it prevents the first colour application from deep-staining the primed surface.
Then I work my sky colours into chosen areas depending on the composition I’m painting. So, supposing I were to paint towering cumulus clouds suggesting later thunder on a hot summer’s day;
I begin by working a gradation of blues from pale on the horizon to darker in the high sky, covering the areas I’ve decided will be unclouded. This I do applying the colour with a 1” brush and then blending it using a 2’’ so I get an even shift in colour from top to bottom. I don’t mind if I encroach a little on the cloud areas. Then I work colour into the underbelly and other shadow areas of the cumulus clouds – probably a mix of ultramarine, indigo and violet, but maybe also rose. Then with the 2’’ brush I might do just a little blending to check if the depth of shadow colour seems appropriate for each part. Importantly this area is kept less blended than the blue sky areas, leaving it a little more viscous (sticky).
Then I take white or slightly yellowed almost-white paint on the edge of a dry, clean 1’’ brush and apply it to the most brightly sunlit edges of the clouds taking back areas that might have been encroached on by the blue sky earlier. I might use a round-ended palette knife to apply these thin curls of white instead of a brush. This white paint I leave very viscous (unthinned) and unblended.
I now have rough structure of the sky. It looks rather unsubtle.
The next stage is where the mystery happens. Taking a dry 4” brush, I stroke it very gently across the whole sky area from the direction of the sunlight. Then I cross back stroking the brush in the opposite direction across the whole sky. Then maybe from top to bottom and from side to side, keeping it gentle. The most fluid areas where the colours have been well-mixed with the titanium white undercoat are dragged more by the brush and the most viscous areas are dragged least. A sky now emerges which looks more and more vaporous, just like real clouds do. If I think it needs extra blending in some areas then I do a little more stroking its those areas with the 4” brush. If I think some areas of shadow need extra colour I will cautiously add that with delicate strokes using a soft, moderate sized, nylon filbert brush and then re-blend with a dry soft 3” or 4” brush. If the clean white edges of sunlit cloud get a little messy I reinforce with more clean white and then re-blend with a clean lightweight nylon fan brush.
If I wanted to paint softer clouds, as we so often see in Cornwall, I would work their colours further into the titanium white undercoat, creating their general shapes and shadows and then, as before, blend with a dry 4” brush. This will look more like a typical ‘wet in wet’ watercolour sky. It lends itself to so many rainy skies where the whole sky is various shades of white and grey. Again, though, if particular areas want highlighting then applying white in its most viscous, straight-from-the-tube consistency, and gently re-blending will further amplify the light coming down on the rest of the landscape below.
The pleasure in using this technique is that the blending process not only enables the natural vaporous forms of of clouds to emerge onto the canvas, but it also carries with it a degree of happenstance, where the sky that is revealed can have surprising subtle and delightful effects within it.
Hog bristle filberts and rounds are the most useful to me for drawing lines and mapping out compositions on canvas. I then use larger versions of the same brushes to infill the chosen ground colours in the different areas of the composition.
I build the detail of the painting, usually beginning with those parts of the painting that appear most distant, again using mostly filberts and rounds, and occasionally stopping to gently blend areas which then recede further into the distance with maybe a 2’’ brush. This reduces unwanted levels of detail while still retaining the suggestive context in which the more important foreground subject areas are grounded.
Coming forward the major elements of the painting are defined in heavier paint, giving them more substance. Again I will be using mostly hog filberts. At this stage I may leave the painting to dry. This enables me to overpaint what’s already there without disturbing what I’ve already painted, and without underlying paint affecting the next stage.
The hog filberts are the easiest brushes to use when laying on a block of colour, or tinting and toning by adding veils of colour over dry underpainting, but there are times when I want more deliberately diffusely-edged but thicker effects. Then I might resort to an older, worn and stiff hog brush to scratch on fine, but thick and diffuse areas like grass or straw, and then supplement that by overpainting with more fine line-work – like stalks whose textures you might want to reach out and bend or snap.
This fine line-work can be achieved using soft, fine-point, nylon brushes like the pointed sables used in watercolour. But here we are not drawing fine lines as we might with ink. Instead we use the fine points to pick up unthinned paint straight off the palette from the tube. It’s sticky and viscous and when I draw it across the surface of the painting it leaves a very narrow trail of thickish paint which stands out from the surface. In effect I’m using the soft point brushes as small, flexible palette knives laying down strong but narrow lines of paint. I can then paint any sort of vegetation which has fine stalks, or the texture of bark on trees, by criss-crossing and layering paint which gives the foreground a sense of depth.
The same technique can be used to lay down highlights where the sun is reflecting directly from plane surfaces like polished metal, wet roads, the specular reflection of sunshine on bunches of leaves, the light on human hair or light coming through the mane and tail of a horse. It is also useful for painting sparkling highlights on rippling water, frost on long grass stems, and the lines of snow on branches and twigs in a winter landscape, to name but a few. It’s a time consuming process building up texture in this way but I have not found any other technique which creates that real three-dimensional effect of the fine rendering of both texture and light. This deep, layered, textural effect creates the illusion that you could literally walk into that pictorial space when you look at an original painting.
– And that magic rubs off onto my giclée prints so beautifully reproduced by Monkeypuzzle Art.