52 Painting with thick acrylics

In this video I add light molding paste from Golden Acrylics to my colors. I also add some Golden Open acrylics (a slow drying formula) to prolong painting time. I paint over a full value, full color under paintings (see blog entries 21 and 23).  This experimental formula keeps my acrylic paint thick even when dry.

51 Door County Plein Air Festival

A few weeks ago I received an invitation to attend the Door County Plein Air Festival 2010. I was pleased, of course, and after investigating the geographic uniqueness of Door County, Wisconsin, decided to accept the invitation. After the invitees were posted on the festival website I received an e-mail from a previous attendee who is also a reader of this blog. She reassured me that the event was absolutely first-class and that I would enjoy it immensely. Everything I've learned about the festival leads me to the same conclusion.

The festival organizers are incredibly generous and offered me and my wife lodging while attending the seven day festival. Such hospitality is hard to beat and for that reason, and others, we look forward to our visit to Door County. I will be conducting a least one workshop while I'm there. It should be a lot of fun. If you are in the area from July 19 to July 26 I hope you will join me.

Over the last year, due to a hard winter here in Utah, I have focused primarily on studio painting and like an athlete who has dropped out for a few seasons I definitely feel out of shape.

To remedy that I intend to begin an intense regimen of outdoor painting. I hope to fuse some of the things I've learned over the last year in the studio with my former plein air techniques. So over the course of the next two months I will be sharing my plein air experiences with you. I've also asked a few of the best plein air painters in America to share their views and techniques with the readers of Thick Paint.

The first interview will be long-time plein air painter Edward Martinez from Kent, Connecticut. I look forward to learning from such an extraordinary painter. Please feel free to post your questions and comments.

Brad Teare © 2010

50 Painting a 2nd acrylic

49 SCUMBLING, GLAZING, AND DRY BRUSH 3 OF 3

48 Scumbling, glazing, and dry brush 2 of 3

47 Scumbling, glazing, and dry brush 1 of 3

In this series of videos I explain how to scumble, glaze, and use dry brush effects.

46 Plein air boot camp Part 2

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THERE are few things as disconcerting as arriving at a painting destination and forgetting critical supplies. A trip to Zion National Park comes to mind where I left my tube of cadmium red light at home (fortunately I did have a tube of quinacridone red). Other disasters include forgetting my tin of mineral spirits. Other times I brought so much gear it was a burden and I felt more like a porter on safari than a painter in the field. The trick is to bring the essentials and pare those essentials down to the bare bone.

As a precursor to actually going out into the field I decided to make a list of necessary items. This list will be growing, contracting, and generally evolving throughout the plein air season as I refine my methods.

The main item in any painter’s field kit will be a good portable easel. I have a French easel and a Gloucester easel for larger paintings. I prefer my gloucester easel but it is difficult to carry on airplanes and has a large palette I made for it that can be difficult to carry over large distances. The french easel has straps like a back pack so I can free my hands for other gear. I use a large white artist umbrella with a clamp to shade my canvas and palette.

I also have an attaché style wooden box which carries pencils, brushes, palette knives, and viewing devises. I carry a canvas bag with all my tubes of paint which are all 150 ml tubes. I have a large tin of mineral spirits (I use Gamsol for low toxicity) and a box of tissues for cleaning my brushes, a plastic bag for disposal (I place a rock in it in the field to keep it from blowing around). For canvases I bring a variety of Utrecht pre-stretched canvases already toned with Venetian red and placed face to face using metal canvas clips to hold the wet surfaces away from each other.

Regarding viewing tools my painting glasses are a must as well as my reduction glass and prism. I made a few composing viewers which I will demonstrate in a future video, one of them used by George Inness. I use my nine value grayscale a lot in the field so I take several of those. I use the palette that came with the French easel but I strap it to the open drawer with a bungee cord so it resembles my studio set-up. I need my left hand free to mix paint just like in the studio.

Concerning colors it is important to keep things simple without resorting to a limited palette (which personally is not to my taste although some use it masterfully). LaConte Stewart suggested a palette consisting of a warm and cool of each primary, which I believe is a good start. I’m going to suggest having dioxazine purple, and transparent earth yellow, two very deep hues that complement each other beautifully. I would add alizarin crimson permanent and sap green. Cadmium red light is a good warm version of red. For blues I use thalo blue (very warm) and Indanthrone blue (very cool). My transparent earth yellow with white works as yellow ochre but I do need a cool yellow so I add cadmium yellow light (which is cooler than the transparent earth yellow). That gives me a cool of each primary plus purple and green. Just to round out the secondary color spectrum I add transparent yellow, a very warm orange similar to Indian yellow (but cleaner). As I mentioned these suggestions will evolve as the season passes so stay tuned.

Brad Teare © 2010

45 Painting without fear

44 PLEIN AIR BOOT CAMP Part 1

IT has been a long winter and here in Utah it isn’t over yet. It snowed eight inches yesterday. I occasionally paint in the winter but didn't this year, preferring to stay in the studio painting with a hot mug of chocolate nearby. But spring will be here eventually and that means it’s time to organize our field kits, grab our french easels, and start painting in the field.

Painting from photos is a great advantage but in the absence of painting from life your interpretation of nature can become impoverished. Painting shadows too dark is a common error of painting from photographs as is painting highlights devoid of color. Even in high and low values the natural world maintains saturated colors. Which is impossible to replicate with the limited value range of pigments. The wide value range that maintain their color intensity in nature is one of my biggest problems when painting outdoors. I tend to match values but because of the inability of paint to capture the high and low values and still preserve saturation I lose color in the high and low value areas of my painting.

This year I intend to consciously focus on forcing my value range more toward middle values, sacrificing an accurate value range in favor of a richer range of colors. In the field I may have relied too heavily on my value scale, but value is only one aspect of a painting. When I painted en plein air my lights would look washed out and my darks like black holes punched in the canvas. My values were accurate but I lost the sense of luminosity.

The remedy is to observe accurate value, record where the important value zones are, but then compress the values to allow more color in those areas. For example the lights should be in the 6 to 7 range and the darks in the 2 to 3 values. That leaves values 4 and 5 for the middle range. In other words to paint effectively outside you must consciously compress your value range to give the illusion of saturated color. Does that mean the 9 value finder is of no importance in the field? Not at all. It will give you accurate measurements you can then decide how to manipulate on your canvas.

The reason plein air painting is so difficult is the need for subtle value shifts, and the necessity of using illusion to maintain saturation. It can be hard to differentiate one zone from the next and still maintain the necessary pattern. If you lose this pattern you lose your overall design and the painting becomes indecipherable. One way to preserve these subtle shifts in to be sure to maintain hard edges and to keep value patches discrete. If edges become too soft or blurred the value zones will no longer fulfill their compositional function.

Nature is the ultimate teacher for the landscape painter and the time is at hand to resume our eduction.

Brad Teare © 2010