Oil Palette Colors

My basic palette is:

Burnt Umber

Burnt Sienna

Raw Sienna

Yellow Ochre

Cadmium Yellow Lemon or Pale

Cadmium Yellow Medium

Cadmium Red Light or Cadmium Scarlet

Alizarin Crimson

Ultramarine Blue or French Ultramarine Blue

Cerulean Blue

Viridian

Sap Green

Titanium White

This is a double primary palette, with a warm and cool of each primary and green.  A true blue and red are also useful so I sometimes add cobalt blue and napthol or pyrrole red.

Occasional colors that I add when the subject requires them.  Most are transparent colors, with high chroma and tinting strength.  

Quinacridone Rose - florals

Phthalo Blue and Green - seascapes

Dioxazine Purple - florals

Indian Yellow - transparent yellow that warms without lightening

Transparent Red Oxide - replacement for Burnt Sienna which is opaque.

Phthalo Yellow Green - opaque, convenience color made from Cadmium Yellow Light and Phthalo Green. 

Masters of the American West Exhibition

That was fun!  I was impressed to see how able to critique you were.  What struck me most?  Yes, there were a few masters there but most were competent, top in the field painters - and getting there is do-able if you take the time and put in the effort to learn.  I hope to see some of you in the Masters show someday!

Tucker Smith, "Wyoming Sky"

Our field trip to the Autry Museum's "Masters of the American West" exhibition is Saturday, February 20th. Admission is $9.   Terry, Adria, Tim, Jen, June, Marcia and Mary are signed up to go. 

Map

Reference Books for Landscape

I recommend these books for painting landscape:

"Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting", by John Carlson.

"Fill Your Oil Paintings with Light and Color", by Kevin Macpherson

"Landscape Painting Inside and Out", by Kevin Macpherson

"Composition of Outdoor Painting", Edgar Payne

Two New Product Lines - Alkyd and Acrylic

Two new paint lines have recently been released, giving artists more paint choices.

C.A.S. AlkydPro is a safflower-based oil paint to which alkyd resin is added to speed drying time.  All colors in the C.A.S. line dry within 24 hours or less. Drying mediums in the line can speed drying time to under two hours. Impasto and gel mediums are also available.  These are not water-based and require Turpenoid. Alkyds are great for plein air painting and for glazing techniques. In the studio I often use Griffin alkyd titanium white with traditional oils to speed drying time.  Oil paint and alkyds are mixable.  My main objection to using a full alkyd palette has been pigment load.  The C.A.S. line claims to have a professional rather than student grade pigment load.   Winsor Newton Griffin Alkyd has been the only alkyd available prior to C.A.S.   So, if you like oil paint but prefer the layers to dry more rapidly, AlkydPro might be worth a try.   

Winsor Newton Artist's Acrylic is replacing their Artist's Acrylic Colour line. The new line is packaged with a black label. Winsor Newton is my favorite acrylic line because of the buttery consistency and high pigment load. Recently other acrylic paint manufacturers have gone in the direction of increasing the open time of acrylics resulting in Golden Open and Chroma Interactive. Winsor Newton decided to tackle a different problem of acrylic paint - value shift. Winsor Newton claims their new line has no value shift from wet to dry. This by far has been my greatest problem with acrylics. They dry as much as 40% lighter and this makes it very difficult to maintain accurate values.  I have not been taken with the longer open time of Golden Open or Chroma Interactive because when I use acrylics, I use them because they dry quickly. If I require slower drying I use oils.  So, Winsor Newton's new line is a huge step in the right direction for me.  I hope they have maintained their pigment load! The secret in their sauce ...  the traditional acrylic suspension shifts from opaque to translucent as it dries and in so doing shifts the paint to a darker value.  Winsor Newton's new acrylic suspension starts out transparent.

Paint the Redwoods Prospectus

A worthy cause with the top 50 winners published in a catalog ... paint the forests of the United States. 

Charles Reid on Planning Lost and Found Edges

by Charles Reid

For those joining me on the contour line and color adventure on Tuesday afternoons this January and February, here's a sneak peek at where we are headed.  This PDF courtesy of www.artistsnetwork.com covers Charles Reid's approach to lost and found edges.  We'll be talking about this!

Late Renoir and American Painting Exhibits at LACMA

Two exhibits at LACMA (LA County Museum of Art) February 28th through May 9th, 2010.

Renoir in the 20th Century

February 14–May 9, 2010

Renoir in the 20th Century focuses on the last three decades of Renoir’s career, when, following his rupture with impressionism, he turned to an art that was decorative, classical, and informed by a highly personal interpretation of the Great Tradition. Renoir’s paintings from this period, which have never been studied and shown as such, are often misunderstood as they do not fit comfortably into the history of high modernism. This exhibition is the first monographic study dedicated to Renoir since the comprehensive retrospective of 1985 at the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais in Paris, and the first one ever mounted by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Offering an unprecedented look at Renoir through the lens of modernism, the exhibition bridges the divide that exists in many people’s minds between art of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries

American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915

February 28–May 23, 2010

From the colonial period to the present, Americans have been inventing characters and plots, settings and situations to give meaning to our everyday lives. American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915includes seventy-five paintings, from before the Revolution to the start of World War I, that tell these stories in scenes of family life and courting, work and leisure, comic mishaps and disasters. These daily experiences were all subject to the artist’s searching and revealing eye and many of the works on view are famous images known to almost every American. Major artists such as Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer, John Singleton Copley and George Caleb Bingham, John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt, are included in this important survey, the first of its kind in over thirty years.