NEW ART PROJECTS GOIN ON?

well, the two bottom ones are watercolors - or rather inks, diluted with water a lot. the top one, the one with the shadows every which way, is oil and acryllic (hey, i don't care, comes in a tube, i use it). in fact i hated oils, but maybe mine were old- they were impossible to mix. so, don't hit me, i added temperas to make them mix easier. so i guess it's oil, acryllic and tempera. i hope i'm not going to hell for that!

oils and acrylics don't mix - that could be your problem if you were using them together.

Acrylics are thinned with water and won't mix at all properly with oils as they are solvent based.


I love oils but they do take some getting used to. I think the easiest ones to start with are the Alkyd range because they behave exactly like normal oils but have a drying medium in their make up and they dry overnight (instead of over many days)

oh my, many days? maybe that's why the house i was housesitting stank for days and days, ha. my apartment is also a problem, i have a tiny little room, which i love, but no 'creative space' other than my writing desk. well, i'll start small. yes, the acryllics and oils were indeed fighting, but i won somehow. even found it interesting, because the oils that sort of curdled in the acryllics, left smudges of their own, which made for a nice textured surface... oh well, live and learn, i won't try that again.

and if you don't experiment you never find out all those lovely accidental things that do work!

Here are a few I have collected to get you started. Self educatin' is good...just practice practice practice!


http://www.huntfor.com/design/tutorials/watercolor.htm

http://www.watercolorpainting.com/

http://www.niloufer.com/tutorial.html

http://www.bobross.com/

http://www.artpapa.com/oil-painting-lesson-1/

http://www.huntfor.com/design/tutorials/oilpainting.htm

http://www.williampowell-artist.com/paintingexerciseintro.html

a few!!! good lord people, i feel intimidated and skaered. but i'll take a bite into it. i like tutorials - the briefer, the better, for i have little patience to spare. will look into the exercises especialy. thaaaanks, keep them coming!

oh, oh that glazing exercise looks good! it has steps that i can follow, i like, i like. but this is going to get expensive- i need some base color to smooth the surface, and colors i don't have and whatnot.... sigh, girl's gotta do, what she's gotta do.

you wont be goin to hell for a venial sin of mixing oils and tempera and acrylics but you could serve some purgatory time.

purgatory's fine with me. sounds more interesting than heaven anyway. at least there's a challenge involve. i like challenges.

Dagmarka - my best advice really is to take a class. It makes you commit to doing it once a week (or more) and it teaches you the fundamentals. Don't worry about being judged - everyone there is there to learn, the same as you.

Nice, new oil paints (like from RGH online, or sennelier, or daniel smith) are rich and creamy.

basically, all paint is a pigment or dye (color) mixed with a medium and binder (oil in oil paints, gum arabic/water in watercolors, water and acryllic resin? in acryllic, egg and water in tempra.)

So, as you wouldn't be able to get oil and water to mix, you wont be able to get oil paint and acryllic to mix.

Also, the rule of paint is that the bottom part needs to dry before the top layer does or it will crack. So, if you're using all these different things then you have no way of controlling the speed of drying.

So, its best to stick to one medium for now. I personally think oils are the best for their translucent quality, their ability to hold texture, and their richness of color. Unfortunately, they are the most toxic of all the paints.

Good luck, and have fun.

Although, to add complication, there are water based oils now. Or, they can be used with water. I forget the company, it might be Holbein. I haven't tried them, I like oily oils, heh, though I used Gamblin solvents, keyed into non toxicity or low.

However, as an aside, Holbein (whether their paints are oil or water based) has some fantastic graphic ads, banners that hang in the art store from time to time. I've liked every single one of them...

Colorbook those links were brilliant - I've added them to favourites to 'lift' bits for my classes

Here's a Holbein paints link - I picked it because I like the distributing company logo:
http://www.black-horse.com/paints.cfm

more, from the Holbein site
http://www.holbeinhk.com/\duooil.htm

i like the idea of water soluble oil colors. and the black horse has great prices! i may get my paws on some of those!!! thanks!

If you're interested, check google under Holbein paints. I think there are sales at some distributors, Dick Blick, for example (if I remember correctly).

Dagmaraka, your first picture is especially striking. The shadows are a bit too prominent for my taste, but the overall picture is dazzling. If I'm any judge of talent, you've got plenty and are obliged to exploit it. Notice how nice the A2Kers are.Farmer, Vivien, Portal and Osso give so freely. Their generosity is so beautiful, and reminds me of why I love this place.
BTW, while you cannot apply acrylics over oil, you can apply oil over acrylics.

Daggy, I talked with the folks at Ellis Engineering today - well, the staff are artists...
and we talked about Holbein re the water soluble oil paints.
The woman at the desk, whose name I'll skip over, uses them herself and likes them.

The guy, a pal whose name I'll skip over, says, people like them, and that what happens is that the paint company adds a surfactant to the mix of paint (like a detergent) and that water is mixed with the paint but by virtue of the surfactant, it both mixes and then evaporates, leaving only oil on the canvas.

I asked him if there were wee holes left in a wash of paint on canvas, and he insisted no.

I don't know myself.

I've never used them (but then I'm hooked on the smell of turps and white spirit!) but a friend who has didn't like them - but then she was used to traditional oils and was comparing them. There are obviously a lot of people out there buying and liking them or they'd be off the market.

Have you done any more work?

I've been meaning for ages to do a series on flowers - not vases of flowers but semi abstract paintings using flowers as a starting point.

This is a very small (6x8in) sketch, in oils on canvas, of some roses in the garden I did some time ago. The Albertine and Masquerade climbing roses tangle over my high fence in June and reminded me of Sanderson's chintz fabrics - you know the Olde Worlde tea shoppe curtains! I really liked that quality.

I fancy working on some large canvasses and experimentig with blowing them up very large and playing with paint and colour and also doing some more studies in June and doing a large canvas of life size flowers in an all over chintz like pattern, don't know if I'll get it done or get sidetracked into something else but that's the idea.

Any feed back and crit?

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Vivin, I can't see them. Just little x-es. Are they on your website?
JLN -thankee, although I have very little time, I love to play with paint for relax or procrastination. these three things plus one other bigger thing are the only things i've ever done, so there's lots of learning ahead. but it will be a lifelong journey, so there's hopefully also lots of time.