Painting thin lines the easy way

Close to the Earth, © 2023 PM Arnold

20x20", Oil on gallery canvas

I took the photo of this Rabbit Brush shrub in 2002 on a trip up Hwy 395 to Mammoth Mountain from Ventura County in November. There was fresh snow on the Sierras and the leaves had turned orange and rich red-browns on all the willows and brush in the dry washes that ran from the foothills down into the Owens Valley. I rediscovered it looking through my old photos this fall and decided it was time to try painting it. I had had some practice painting skinny twigs and thought I might be successful this time, but was still very surprised at how well it went.

I've never had much luck painting thin lines with small round brushes, and especially now that my hands shake more than they used to. But what I have found that works is a 3/8-to-1/2" bright brush, synthetic or fine hair, using the long edge and touching it as lightly to the canvas as I can. The paint has to be liquid enough to flow off the brush, and if I make a blob or the line is too thick I swoop in immediately with a clean brush to pick up the extra. The other attribute of a brush this size is that it will hold a fair bit of paint, and it's not too hard to get a nice long line before you run out of paint. Only new or un-frayed narrow-edged brushes will work, and I try to keep a newish one on hand just for this purpose. Once I cover an area with lines I'll usually let them dry before I paint on top them; once I get good ones down, I don't want to risk messing them up.

In the photo, the sand & dirt was covered with a layer of tiny gravel, but I decided that was more texture than the painting needed, and just shaded in the varied grays and tans without offering much detail. Painting the live and dead branches took the most time, as I was trying to capture their varied colors and "bundle" appearance.

Is this what inspiration feels like?

Sunny Afternoon at Horsethief Butte ©2023

I was looking through all my Gorge photos and found a pretty dull shot of a streak-clouded sun above the landscape that really grabbed me. Staring at it, something in my mind spent a few seconds pointing out what I could do with its obvious challenges, and briefly I magically visualized what I wanted it to look like. Putting aside the other candidates I had pulled out, I used iPhoto to get more detail in the foreground rocks, and went to work. I roughed in the sky and sun first, realized that it looked exactly like I wanted it to, then worked my way down, pretty evenly, till it was finished. I'm sure that having pre-visualized the whole thing resulted in a better outcome than I'm used to having.

Since that approach to choosing my next subject had worked so well, I decided to try it again. I went through the large collection of candidates but nothing would talk to me. I looked back at my old photo files to trips in California, and came across a pair of subjects I'd thought about doing for years. These were taken on US 395, a winter trip to Mammoth Mountain, on the dry side of the Sierras with the mountains on one side and the high desert of the Owens Valley on the other. I had the same experience with them, of quickly going through the way I wanted to paint each one, the major steps to make it interesting.

I'm glad that my mind is finally catching on to the idea that I don't want to just copy a photo, I want to use it as a reference for a more introspective painting, with some particular feel, or emotion to it. It's rare that I take a photo that would be perfect without any changes, so being skilled enough to handle adapting it to catch people's attention would be a big step up for me. And another issue--a trap I'd like to not fall into any more is literally copying a photo because I love the subject and then finding out it makes a confusing, unfocused painting. I've done that more times than I want to think about it.

So if I can add this mental process to help me screen my photos for winners, that will be great! No more boring paintings!

Every painting a new learning experience

 

White Salmon River in Husum, WA
Oil on canvas panel, 18" x 24"

On this one I learned how to wipe off oil paint so I could repaint things I didn't like. I tried scraping it off with the palette knife, but I don't use enough paint to scrape off, so I used small cut-up pieces of paper towel, being careful not to scrub so I don't leave paper fibers in the paint. A little bit of turpentine on the towel helps stubborn paint. I always cut up a paper towel into a couple sizes of small scraps and stack them next to the palette on my table. A stack usually last me a few paintings, and they're really handy when I get paint where I don't want it. I also keep a roll of good, sturdy toilet paper there for wiping knives or brushes, or cleaning the palette. Most of the tricks I learned painting in acrylics also work for oils, but I'm having to relearn how to work with slow-drying paint. Sometimes, I just have to wait for it to get tacky--like when I have to rework small detail. The older I get, the more my hand moves in strange ways, and the more blobs I make.

I also got quite a bit of practice on this one doing blending on the canvas, and I recommend the Paint Coach videos on YouTube if you're new to oils. It is definitely easier to lighten than it is to darken something.

One thing I've learned in all these years is that it's REALLY important to have the RIGHT amount of paint in the RIGHT color and the JUST RIGHT consistency, to make a successful brushstroke, no matter what your style is. I guess it's only experience--millions of brushstrokes, or maybe billions--to figure out what that needs to be, every time you pick up your brush. Too much paint, it's a blob, too little, it's a stutter. But in creative hands, even blobs and stutters can make amazing paintings. In any case, I hope to be painting for several more years!

I finally found myself a painterly approach

For years I've been trying to loosen up my painting style and stop being locked into a purely realistic approach, and this painting feels to me like my first truly conscious achievement of a naturalistic painting that used brushstrokes as a fundamental element of the design. Participating in the Van Gogh immersive show last year was perhaps the final impetus to making that happen. Having the oil paints with their workability definitely helped.

I used mostly two brushes, a 1/8" flat and a 1/4" bristle bright, and adding a small 1/16" synthetic round for the foreground flowers and grass. Normally I would have switched to the small round to try to get the distant trees to look more like trees, but I've finally accepted that that's not what makes a painting good. What makes a painting look good to me is a good composition, an interesting or pleasing color combination, and some opportunity of mental or emotional connection.

I'm finding that I really enjoy painting the magnificent landscapes of the gorge and I want to paint as many of these beautiful places as I can. Coyote Wall is part of the Washington Syncline, a U-shaped fold with the youngest layers of rock on the inside. The other half of this U is on the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge. I'm not sure how the wall formed but it looks like a slump/slide to me. It's another famous climbing site, one of several in the Gorge. I took the reference photos in April of 2019, the year of the Balsamroot Superbloom.

It was a bit of a revelation to me when I first brushed in the trees, to find that they looked just like trees to me, and I remembered what I've heard many times from artists I admire that engaging the viewers' own imagination helps them connect with a painting. A realistic or naturalistic painting is an illusion that invokes a response from the viewer, and imagination is what makes that possible. So there's no reason to feel like you have to paint detail, unless you want to.

Recovering the Joy of Oil Paints

Catnap

A few weeks ago, a friend gifted me with a full set of Oil Paints that her son no longer wanted, and got me painting with them again! I had switched to acrylics because in the predominantly wet weather here in Beavercreek, they were taking more than a week to dry. This was before Alkyd paints were popular, and I'd had enough of water-miscible oils that I wasn't going to mess with that any more. But a few years ago I got a heat pump, and it keeps the humidity inside low enough that they dry in about half the time they used to. And I'd been thinking about wanting to get back into them since last fall, but was dissuaded by the cost of buying a good big set.

So I picked up some turpenoid products and spent a couple hours watching The Paint Coach on YouTube, and started my first painting. I picked the most complicated composition I'd ever tried, which was a mistake, and it took me almost 4 weeks to get it to an acceptable state, but I'm working on a second one that should be a lot more fun and relaxed. I'm wanting to play with them more, try out some new techniques, and just relish the gooiness and pleasures of oils.

One thing I've really missed with acrylics is the possibilities of brushstrokes! It's really fun to use brushstroke to mimic actual texture in the subject, or to add structure to the painting as a whole by changing how a particular part of the composition reflects the light or attracts the eye of the viewer. Think of Van Gogh's brushstrokes. Ever since I was immersed in the superb Van Gogh show and display last year, I have repeatedly enjoyed strong visual memories of how persuasive his sculptural brushstrokes are, how they attract attention and reinforce both the colors and designs he created. I wasn't able to do use brushstrokes in this painting, I was too overwhelmed by working on an intimidating combination of unfamiliar subjects—the person, the cat and the fabric--but I'm trying to use them in the painting currently on my easel—a landscape of the famous Coyote Wall in the Columbia Gorge. I'm sure it'll take me some time to get used to thinking about every single brushstroke as I load the brush and apply the paint, but it's a skill I look forward to getting good at.

One creative choice I did manage to assert in this painting was to eliminate two thirds of the stripes on this duvet. Putting them in would have added another month or two to the painting time, and given the shakiness of my hands these days, would have made it a lot more chaotic and difficult to look at.

Back to Horsethief Butte

I still have at least 100 pictures of the Columbia Gorge that I want to paint, and this time I went back to Horsethief Butte for a south view showing late afternoon light on the western part of the butte, plus the vegetation farther from the walking trail near the massive outcropping. I went with friends just before sunset and I shot many images as the sun slowly dropped behind Mt Hood and the Columbia River. Most of the grass was long gone dry, just the tiny water-hoarding groundcovers still showing any green. Gray, Tan, Ochre, and Orange were the dominant colors. Horsethief sits in the rain shadow of the northern Cascade range so it dries out mid summer to glowing golden slopes between the blue sky and the river reflecting it. It was a beautiful evening and made a lot of memories for me.