Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Color study woman painting, pink and red

 

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Here the painting is drying outside, the fumes were killing me.

Pink and Red color study

 

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Over the weekend I’ve been busy painting as I mentioned earlier. I love these little canvasses. This one is 50cm x 50cm. 100% linen canvas.

Monday, April 26, 2010

The never ending saga: paint on canvas or on plywood

I have canvas on a roll, I have all the tools like a mitersaw and even a compressor with brad nailer. But this time, I needed to make some paintings fast for an upcoming presentation, so I had to buy. I bought a Lefranc Bourgeois canvas 100% Linen size 60cm x 120cm, price 58Euro, that's like $70. I think that's a hefty price to pay for canvas. Okay, it's the best quality out there but still. For an artist budget, not knowing if you will ever sell this painting, it's a lot to spend. Made me think again of using plywood to paint; there are so many advantages, it's cheap, strong, doesn't warp or stretch or sag like canvas, and when the surface is prepped well, you have a super finish in your works. It's certainly something I will look into. Of course the prep work is going to be time consuming, priming & sanding. I will try it out anyways, I'm sure the result is going to be awesome.

Reminiscing Hazel Dooney's issues with paint fumes

The entire weekend when I was painting I had to think of Hazel Dooney, a successful painter from Australia (twitter: @dooneystudio) that writes a lot about the nauseating experiences she has daily from working with the paint. Normally I don't have issues with it, but I was painting in an small enclosed space, very concentrated and paying attention to detail (with nose almost on the canvas). My eyes were actually tingling, burning and itching, stronger than when you peel an onion. Geeez. I had to take a headache pill. Today I worked outside in the yard, and left the paintings to dry overnight outside as well. (I wanted to prevent that, cause there are a lot of mosquitos and there's a great chance they will stick on it, but I don't have a choice. I working on a cool set of paintings.