Painting Tools

Went to the craft shop near Taplow and bought some supplies.

Got the linseed oil, turpentine and an extra brush, along with a small tabletop easle. Also got painting by numbers kits for the girls to encourage a bit of dabbling from them.

Saw a small oil painting similar to what I intend to do for sale in Windsor, for £595.

What's keeping me :-)

Writing

Things have been a bit slow on the art front recently; I have been procrastinating as I expected I would, but some irregular progress has been made.

Inspired by the Sunday Telegraph Magazine, which has a page called "In your Own Words", I decided to write a humourous article. The article should be about 600 words, but mine came in at over 1000. So I got DJ to read it and savagely cut it back.

The resulting article is I think quite good, and I hope to pluck up the courage to send it in for consideration as soon as I can decide what format they might like it in.

I'm not sure whether this effort can be used as a monthly goal, but writing is definitely something I wanted to do more of. Perhaps I'll use it as a precursor to February, and make that month's target to write a series of six articles for publishing. I've even had a go at a second triathlon related piece!

Painting subject

This is a bit of a no brainer for me, as I can't draw, so anything like portraits, still life or landscapes would be pretty rubbish. I suppose I could claim to be deliberately bad, but I imagine the result will not be something I'd like on my wall, so I'm not going down that road.

So I've decided to do a seascape, a very simple one with no rough seas or waves dashing against rocks. I have a print I really like by an artist called Doutreleau called "After The Storm" I've found a link to it here, but if that link breaks I've grabbed it


It's pretty minimal and uses not too many colours and I will emulate this somewhat, though I'm aiming for a rougher texture.

Painting tools

Looks like I need a few other pieces of equipment before I start my painting.

Paint:

The kit I have comes with 6 tubes of paint, approximate colours are white,red,yellow,blue,green and brown. Each is 22ml, and my canvas is 14 X 10 inches. I'm sure I could do some calculation to work out whether I have enough paint to cover the canvas, but I have a feeling I'm going to come up a bit short. This may well be more of a problem as I don't really think I'll be using green and brown at all anyway, and I'll probably waste quite a lot with bad mixing. Must find a shop where I can get extra suplies

Brush

I only have one brush, which should be OK for general purpose work, but this means only painting one colour at a time - I have a feeling that cleaning the brush will become very tedious, and so I think I'll need at least one more.

Cleaning

White Spirit
Turpentine
Linseed Oil

The white spirit/turpentine is to clean my brush when I switch colours, and a mixture of turpentine and linseed oil is to lightly brush on my painting if I have to leave it to dry and then restart later.

Painting 1

After a few days off, due to my birthday and trying to find a job, I'm definitely starting my research on painting a picture now.

I've got a book, The Artist's Handbook (ISBN 0751364398)

Not only does it have good a section on oil painting, other forms of art (including photography and mozaic - ideas for later) are also represented.

Retrieved my painting kit from the back of the drawer, and it contains the following:

Daler-Rowney Georgian Oils Starter Set
Oil Painting for Everyone book (by Victor Askew)
14"X 10" Canvas Panel
Bristlewhite B48 Brush

Here is a picture of it

Hoping oil paints don't go off.

The Year Starts

I've decided to make 2005 my art year.

I've created a bulletin board site for this, currently residing here: Art Year

I'm hoping to use that site to store my progress on the various sub-projects. And I'm going to blog a bit here. I'm hoping some people might be interested enough to post comments and suggestions, even criticisms, but I'm not sure whether the bulletin board or the blog will be more convenient, so both are available.

Read all about the project here Art Year Description