Thursday, February 2, 2012

Rockcastle County demo

For my next pastel workshop at Artists' Attic I'm demonstrating an oil wash underpainting before applying the pastel on top.
Richard McKinley is the king of oil washes and he's so skilled with the underpainting that many times he leaves quite a bit of the oil wash showing.
In this example you can see that I have covered almost all of the oil wash-not as skilled with my underpainting as Richard McKinley. However there is still an advantage to the oil wash method.
When an underpainting is created with a very thin application of oil paint, thinned to a stain with turpentine, the initial application of pastel sticks like glue to the sanded paper because there is no underpainting of pastel - no layer of pastel to fill up the tooth of the paper.
The layer of pastel is applied with a very light hand watching carefully to allow the creative play of shapes and colors to emerge from the oil underpainting.

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