Art Question: How Do I Care for Brushes When Painting Outdoors?

Daine W. recently asked me how to care for brushes when painting oil paints outdoors? Do you have to bring along a portable brush washer, or is there another way to deal with this?

There are a few things to do to care for brushes when painting outdoors.

First, always make sure that your brushes are not standing on their heads whenever you are in transit or when you are painting. That means NOT LEAVING YOUR BRUSHES IN YOUR JAR OF TURPS! Other than letting paint dry on your brush, this is the quickest way of ruining your brushes. If you don't have room on your easel for laying down your brushes, then you can lay them on the ground or even stick them handle first in the ground.

Second, if it is sunny outside your paint will dry faster, even on your brushes. If you have a brush with paint on it and have decided to use a different brush for awhile, rinse the paint-filled brush in your turps before you set it aside. Paint can get a quick "skin" on it in the sun. This can cause problems when you go to use it again.

Thirdly, I never fully clean my brushes while in the field. There is enough to carry to worry about bringing enough turps and other items to clean in the field. When I am done painting, I will make sure I have rinsed my brushes as best I can with the turps I have on hand. I will wipe them with a rag. If I am just a short way from home (a half-hour or so), I will put the rinsed and wiped brushes in my paint box and take them home to clean them.

If it will take longer to get home, I will clean and rinse like above and then dip the brushes one more time in the turps so they are fully wet. I will then stick them in a plastic baggie with a zip top. I will close the zip top and try to get as much air as possible out of the baggie. If my brushes are wet with turps and there is no air, any paint on them can't dry out.

Video: Painting a Chicken

First - boil two quarts of water...
Here is a video of me painting a chicken. This video is too fast to notice, but as I was putting the final touch on the beak, a drop of turps ran down off the collar of the brush onto the canvas and I had to spend another fifteen minutes fixing it. Enjoy!

Art Lesson: Creating a Sense of Space

This is Flood Plain, a painting I am working on. This is an oil painting of the flood plain of the Mississippi River located in the St. Anthony Falls gorge which stretches from downtown Saint Paul to downtown Minneapolis. This specific area is on the eastern bank, just inside the Minneapolis border.

As mentioned in the last entry, I am trying to combine two techniques for painting. One technique is linear in nature and the other is more traditional in its approach to color and the representation of space. I need to beef up the more realistically painted tree (I will call him Oliver) in order to balance with the strong contrast of the drawn trees.

In the image above, I have put Oliver in place, but have not gotten into details just yet. I feel at this point that Oliver needs more contrast in order for him to stick out and have a sense of realistic space. Contrast is the key to realistic space. I have decided to paint the background darker in order to have Oliver's light-catching leaves stand out more.












In this second image you can see the trees across the river have been darkened and some details have been added to them. Their forms break down into large billowy shapes of very grey-blue green. I have also lightened the water considerably in order to make even more contrast and a sense of space behind Oliver.

I will now let this backdrop dry before I tackle painting Oliver again.

Art Question: Dealing with Transitions

This is a painting I am in the midst of discovering. As I transition into a new technique with my work, once in awhile, I come to a crossroads where I am not sure what is next.

I originally painted this entire canvas with the appropriate background colors for the different elements; grey-blue-green trees on the other side of the river, blue sky, blue water with some shadowy areas, green grass and purpley and pink sand areas. But, in keeping with my new direction, I wanted the trees to be lines drawn on the canvas. Once they were in, this seemed a bit boring and ineffective. I decided to have one tree painted realistically for contrast. This also seems to symbolize my own transition away from my formal painting background to a more symbolic and abstract technique.

I began to fill in the background with a solid color so the trees will feel more like a drawing. In the process, I changed a few things that bothered me: the base of the clump of trees, edges and the handling of bark. Now this is starting to feel better. The added simplification of the drawn tree area adds more pressure to convincingly portray the realistic tree. The contrast in painting styles means both styles will have to be strong enough to create a balance. I have a fear the realistic tree could look too painterly or too weak in terms of contrast.

I will deal with the realistic tree this weekend. In the meantime, I am not happy with the color of the background I painted today. It needs to be cooler and slightly darker. I was painting into yellow paint that was still a bit wet - this added warmth to the background color in some areas. Oh well, I will repaint it again later, but at least I know what I want now. As it is with any crossroad: make an educated guess, walk down that road and be ready to adjust.

Self-Transendance and Beauty, Part 2

Having been feeling a bit un-unified in all of my many activities lately, I have been looking for something to help move me forward, to help me find more meaning in what I am doing. Finding meaning in my activities has been helped tremendously by a concept of Victor Frankl's, as presented in his book Will to Meaning, published 1969. The concept is called dimensional ontology. Ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences.

Having read Frankl's definition, I realized that all of my activities make sense to me, as individual activities, but as a whole they are not ordered or grouped in a way that makes any sense to me. But then he had the following diagram in his book on page 23.

Basically, Frankl talks about how an object in a higher dimension can look contradictory in a lower dimension. For example, a cylinder, if viewed in two dimensions from a side view-point, will look like a rectangle. But if it is viewed in two dimensions from the bottom, it will look like a circle. A rectangle and a circle are contradictory, but they both describe a cylinder.

Perhaps my activities are like dimensional ontology. Perhaps what looks like several different activities actually reflect one activity or concept in a higher dimension? If I were to add up all of my activities; painting, writing, Art Dandi, coordinating gardens, coordinating public art maintenance, starting an education department, seeking local food access for the city I live in, fixing up my house, fathering, friendships and family, what do they all reflect in a higher dimension, from a broader perspective? An unruly mess. :P But as I look more closely I start seeing a larger concept of creating environments where transformation can happen. I am not focused on what elements create transformation, i.e. knowledge, time, physical growth, communal growth, etc. But I am very concerned about transformations happening. One form of transformation is self-transcendance. Another larger concept I see is the creation of beauty and beautiful things. Beauty creates transformation within an individual or group of a kinder, more compassionate way. Even a way of transcendance. So, I am beginning to understand the broader themes I find in my life. Like a child flexing its muscles until it can control what it is doing, I am building upon my life experiences to create environments for transformation, environments for self-transcendance.

These ideas have helped me to organize my life in my head, now I'll see if these concepts hold up when I apply my hands to them.

What's beautiful in your life?
http://www.markgranlund.com/

Video: Painting a Kalanchoe

What's beautiful in your life? http://www.markgranlund.com/

Art Lesson: Shading

This is an art lesson on how to shade with a pencil. This lesson only focuses on the act of using a pencil to shade an area of a drawing. How to use shading to accurately represent an object in a drawing will be in a later lesson.

When drawing with a pencil, one only has three elements to work with: line, shape and value. Shading and hatching are ways to make value. Shading is the act of creating an accurate range of values with smooth transitions. Whereas, hatching is the means of creating values with a series of lines. With hatching, one's lines show and can produce a sense of energy or roughness. Shading is about a more accurate sense of how light might fall on an object. For an art lesson on hatching, click here. Shading is much like hatching in that the more lines or marks drawn in an area the darker it will appear. But the techniques of shading differ from hatching in two common ways:

- applying more or less pressure to the pencil makes values darker or lighter

- one can use a variety of pencils to produce a variety of values

Also, like hatching, shading works best when there is an organized manner in which marks are drawn on the paper. Stroking marks in one direction will help to create a uniform surface to your shading. If your strokes are very visible, it helps to shade across your first layer with a second layer of strokes in a different direction. Try not to stroke at a true 90 degree angle to your first layer. This can make your shading look like a screen or grid instead of the surface of the object you are drawing.

Edges are important with shading. To create a strong edge, the strokes should not go beyond the shape. In order to have a crisp clean edge, stroke away from the edge of the shape and then clean up by stroking carefully along the edge of the shape.

Sometimes ridges of darker value appear within your shading. Some areas of value are too big to shade in one quick row of hatch strokes. In these areas you need to work your way across the shape with a series of strokes. The dark edges I mentioned are caused by overlapping strokes as you work your way across an area. There are a few ways to avoid this. If the dark ridges are not highly noticeable, sometimes it is enough to add another layer of hatch strokes in a different direction. Another solution is to stagger your hatch strokes so that there is not an edge to overlap (see example). Then stagger your next series of hatch strokes into the previous series(example has darkened strokes to show technique. Second series of strokes should be same value as first series). The final solution for ridges is when you come to the end of your strokes, lighten up the pressure on the pencil to lighten the lines. This way, when you draw your next series of strokes the lines will be lighter where they overlap. With practice, the value of the overlapping ends will match the value in the middle of the stroke. I generally use a combination of all three of these techniques.

Shading Exercise 1: Practice shading by making shading boxes (like below). Boxes should be 1.5" x 3". Practice shading by making one box of solid value, one box that transitions from dark to light, one box that transitions from light to dark and back to light again and finally, a box with a line through it with both shapes going from dark to light.

Shading Exercise 2: Make a shading box that transitions from dark to light for each of the following pencils: 4H, 2H, HB, 2B, 4B. Then make one larger box (3" x 6") using all five of the pencils to transition the box from dark to light. Use the 4B for the darkest area and transition all the way to the 4H for the lightest areas.

What's beautiful in your life?
http://www.markgranlund.com/