On my oil palette, I usually include a phthalo color. Why? Because phthalo blue and its cousins, phthalo green and phthalo emerald, possess high chroma and a high tinting strength. It has such a high tinting strength, in fact, that one little tube will last years. It really only takes a speck to make a difference in your paint mixtures.
Phthalo is the painter’s equivalent of nitroglycerine. You should probably need a permit to use it.
When I tell the students who’ve not used it before to add just the tiniest bit, they usually scoop up a three-month supply on their brush. The results are disastrous, of course. Unless you’re skilled enough to use a single hair of your brush to pick up the phthalo, you’re better off using a knife.
For those of you who have trouble managing phthalo, I include the following illustrations. The first photo shows a pinhead’s worth of phthalo emerald on the knife. The second photo shows that pinhead’s worth mixed into white. The third photo shows a second pinhead’s worth mixed in. It’s pretty dramatic.
By the way, I’ve set up a coupon that will give you $1 off my $10 online video course, Plein Air Essentials – Oil Supplement. This course includes not just several mini-videos but also a 30-minute oil demonstration. The coupon code is PAEOS and is good only until July 21. Go to this link for the course.
 |
| “Mr Roosevelt’s House” 12×24, oil |
This week, I’m getting together paintings for my one-man exhibition at Sunbury Shores Arts & Nature Centre. The theme for the show is “Buildings in the Landscape.” Although I paint the natural landscape, I love painting buildings, too. The older and more rickety, the better! All of the paintings will feature buildings, but in some of them, the presence of man’s hand will be subtle. I plan to include one painting where I challenge you to find the building in it.
We’ll have an opening reception, too. The reception will be Friday, July 20th, from 5-7 pm Atlantic Time at Sunbury Shores, 139 Water Street, St Andrews-by-the-Sea, New Brunswick. I hope you’ll all come! I plan to arrive by boat with friends, direct from Campobello Island. I’m looking forward to both the boat ride and the show.
The show will run from July 20-August 14th. If you can’t make the reception, I hope you’ll be able to stop in. I’ve included here a few of the paintings you can see.
During the last week of the exhibition, I’ll be teaching a four-day course in St Andrews. It will be “Plein Air Sketch to Studio.” In this workshop, we’ll spend half the day in the field gathering reference material and the other half in the studio creating paintings from this material. The workshop is for all levels and all media. Cost is $295 ($275 for members) + HST. Contact Sunbury Shores to register: www.sunburyshores.org, info@sunburyshores.org, 506-529-3386
 |
| “Early Morning Fog” 9×12, oil |
 |
| “Rainy Day Barns” 9×12, pastel |
My oil painting students sometimes ask: How can you lighten color without adding so much white that the color turns chalky?
The first obvious answer is, simply, to use less white. I always first try to lighten my mixture by adding a light, tubed color. For example, I will add cadmium yellow to lighten a dark green. But sometimes this approach will change the hue more than I want. In this case, I’ll use white cautiously. If the mixture loses saturation or warmth (both of which happen when you add white), I’ll add a touch of some light, warm, analogous color.
Instead of white, some painters use a tint of Naples yellow. The problem with using Naples yellow rather than white is that your painting may feel a little too warm overall.
Another approach is to paint transparently on a white ground. If you use transparent colors, they will work like watercolors and give you rich color. I bet you’ve never seen a “chalky” watercolor painting! (I’ve included a couple of plein air watercolors from this week for your enjoyment.) Save your opaque paint for final touches and highlights.
Finally, you might try using zinc white rather than titanium white. Zinc is more transparent and will let some of the color’s richness show through.
On another note, I want to mention the painter Xiao Song Jiang. His painting, “Tide,” just won the Oil Painters of America’s Gold Medal in the 2012 national exhibition. I was honored to have critiqued this painting for Song Jiang through Artists Network University. It is a pleasure to see such fine craftsmanship. You can see the painting here.
This week marks my first week of workshops for the summer here on Campobello Island. We had beautiful weather today, and it looks like we’re going to get beautiful weather for the rest of the week. To mark the occasion, I took the workshop out to one of my favourite locations in the Roosevelt Campobello International Park, where we have views of Grand Manan Island, the Wolves and lots of open water.
I chose to demonstrate in pastel for the group. (Tomorrow, I’ll be doing watercolor.) The scene is a difficult one, because of the expanse of water between the beach and Racoon Point. But I chose to focus on the quality of the water itself, and especially on some of the waves approaching the beach. For this piece, I did a quick block-in with hard pastels, followed by an alcohol wash and then a finishing layer of pastel.
By the way, I’m offering $1 off my $10 “Plein Air Essentials – Learn the Basics” course. You can use this coupon code – PAE072012. Coupon is good only through July 7th, and there are only 20 of them! Go to this link to sign up and redeem the coupon: http://www.udemy.com/plein-air-painting-essentials/
It’s now July, and that means beach roses. They’ve already been blooming for weeks, but soon they’ll really start to explode. Yesterday, I went out to paint roses as part of the final Plein Air Painters of the Bay of Fundy paintout.
Although many places in the U.S. are suffering triple-digit temperatures – it hit 106 at my sister’s house in Georgia – on Campobello I don’t think it even hit 80. That’s still warm for us here. But these warm days, coming before the ocean has a chance to heat up, can create fog. As I drove out, I kept my eye on a wall of it that seemed to sit just off the coast.
Liberty Point, which you can see from the Lower Duck Pond, was keeping the fog at bay, so I had a clear view of my roses. But as I finished up, the wind suddenly shifted and the fog rolled in. The temperature must have dropped 15 degrees.
As many of you know, I use a split-primary palette in the field. It’s hard to come up with a proper “beach rose red” with it. White with alizarin crimson makes a color that is a very rough approximation. What I do in this case is do what I can with my field palette and then head for the studio. Once I’m back, I pull out my secret ingredient: Thio Violet. This intensely-pigmented color (PR122) from Grumbacher is pretty close, and it only takes a few dabs, mixed with white, over the roses I painted in the field. I added a little of it into the beach gravel, too, to unify the painting.
I use secret ingredients in all my flowers. The split-primary palette doesn’t really do justice to most gardens. But I have a hoard of odd, tubed colors back in the studio. Among them are some great high-chroma colors for flowers.
 |
| “Luminous Fog” 6×8, oil If I were to apply labels to this, I might use “fog,” “tree,” “water,” “cliff.” But what about applying labels that would indicate mood, color scheme or key? |
If you’re like me, you’re very bad about organizing your digital reference photos. I take a few hundred pictures at a time, dump them to my hard drive and then forget about them. I put them into folders that are stamped with the date on which I took the photos. Back years ago, when I didn’t have so many photos, it was pretty easy to remember approximately when I made a particular field trip and took a photo of a particular subject. That great photo of those herring smokehouses with the tide out on Grand Manan? Yeah, that’s right, I think it was the middle of May, 2005. I have a great visual memory.
I could find that photo in 2006 or 2007. But seven years later, my own memory banks are too full to remember when I made that trip to Grand Manan. I have to go through my dated folders, surfing through tiny thumbnails.
If I’d been smart about it, I would have started labelling photos from the start. You could always label photos with Adobe Photoshop, and recently, Google’s Picasa added this capability. (I use Picasa to search my computer and put images in albums.) But it’s a Herculean task – maybe more like a Sysiphean one – to do this retroactively. I don’t have the time to go back and apply labels.
And of course, I still don’t label my new photos.
Google is working on software that will, among other tasks, label photos for you automatically. You may know that Picasa can already recognize if there is a face in an image and label it as such, but this is light-years beyond this. Once the software is trained, it should be able to find that photo of smokehouses for me. But it’s going to require more computing power than I have in my desktop – or in yours. The software currently is being trained on a supercomputer made up of 1600 CPUs.
Here’s a news article about this developing neural network. It has learned to recognize a cat when it sees one, without any human coaching.
 |
| “Yellow Day with Lupines,” 6×8, oil |
When I’m done painting, I always end up with a good deal of contaminated paint on the palette. This contaminated paint, if used in color mixtures, will give unpredictable results. For example, sometimes I’ll notice my white has little bits of all kinds of colors in it. If I’m trying to make a light, clean violet by adding alizarin crimson and ultramarine blue to it, those specks of yellow will certainly muddy things up. But, who wants to waste paint? So, I scrape it up into a pile, blend it with a knife — and I’m often amazed at the beautiful color this “mud” makes!
It’s so beautiful, I often use it in the next painting.
The painting above was made with my leftover paint. I wish I had taken a photo of the color, but it was a subtle, yellow-green. A little went into all my mixtures. You can see a purer version of it, mixed with white, in the lightest passages in the sky.
The color was appropriate for the day. Although we’re having torrential rain at the moment, last week we had a few of those hazy, bright days that make us think of deep summer. The air is filled with a golden light. I wanted to capture that sense of light in this small piece.
By the way, I don’t recommend using leftover paint if you mix any medium into it. The medium will change the character of the paint. This is especially true if you use an alkyd medium; the paint will have “cured” too much in just a few hours to be useful.
 |
| “Ice Pond” 9×12, oil |
Not too far in the woods behind our house is an old ice pond. Those of you who don’t live in areas with cold winters may not be familiar with the term. An ice pond is a place where people used to get ice in the winter for refrigeration. They’d use big saws to cut the ice and then horses to haul it to an ice house, where the blocks would be buried in sawdust. The sawdust served as insulation to keep the ice solid throughout the summer. Remember that when you go to your fridge and press the button to fill up your glass with chipped ice; you have it easy.
The other day, I hiked back to the pond to paint it. It is a little kettle pond, left behind by glaciers ages ago, and tall spruce trees surround it. Sphagnum moss lines its periphery. Here and there, a birch has pushed aside the spruces and reached out a green limb or two.
What draws me to this pond is the effect of light and shadow on it. When you have a pond with a certain amount of particulate matter suspended in the water such as this one, the water will glow a warm, muddy brown where the light hits it. Shadowed parts take on an almost violet cast. (By the way, that particulate matter didn’t matter to our forebears; the ice was for preserving food, not for chilling a martini.) For this painting, I first blocked in the warm, muddy brown areas and next the violety shadows. The little bits of reflected sky light I added in toward the end.
One interesting thing you may note about the sunlit part of the pond is that it is nearly pure orange in the foreground and then cools to a more red-violet in the distance. I didn’t see it that way, but it helps with creating an illusion of distance from one end of the pond to the other.
 |
| Trina’s Lupines, 9×12, oil |
For those of you visiting Downeast Maine or Coastal New Brunswick this summer, there’s a new cultural guide out for the area. It’s called Artsipelago, which is a play on the word “archipelago.” (You can visit the website at www.artsipelago.com.) I’m on the list of artists, under Friar’s Bay Studio Gallery. I hope you’ll stop by for a visit.
On another note, I’ve been playing with painting on unstretched canvas. Although in the past I haven’t cared much for painting on canvas because of the texture, I’m enjoying painting on this particular canvas. I picked up a small roll of Fredrix Style 589 Portrait Acrylic Primed Linen Canvas from Dick Blick. I don’t find the weave objectionable. The two paintings accompanying this post were painted on it.
Why paint on unstretched canvas? I’ve heard that it’s the best way to travel. Lighter than carrying a stack of hardboard panels, a dozen pieces of canvas and one backboard take up very little room. If you’re flying to, say, New Zealand (where I’m teaching a workshop next March,) this method would be very handy. I just tape a piece to a backboard with masking tape and have at it.
Of course, one might ask, But what if the paintings are still wet? As Mr McGuire told Ben in The Graduate, “I just want to say one word – plastics.” A sheet of plastic wrap over each piece will keep the painting from smearing if it’s still tacky. If you’re prone to an impasto technique, you’ll lose some texture, but you can easily add more paint once you’re home. Or, you can use alkyds such as Gamblin’s Fastmatte paints and have the painting dry more quickly. When everything’s dry, Lineco Neutral pH Adhesive, a reversible and archival glue, can be used to mount the painting on a suitable backboard.
 |
| Summer Shadows, 9×12, oil |
 |
| “Path through the Apple Trees” 9×12, oil – available |
In conjunction with the Plein Air Painters of the Bay of Fundy paintout over the upcoming Independence Day/Canada Day weekend, Friar’s Bay Studio Gallery will host a reception for the artists and public.
You’re invited to stop by the gallery on Saturday, June 30, from 5-7 pm Atlantic Time for the reception. This will also be our first open day for the season! We’re located at 822 Route 774 on Campobello Island. For full directions and other information, vist the website at www.FriarsBayGallery.com.
Starting July 3, our hours will be Tuesday-Saturday, 1-6 pm Atlantic Time (other times by appointment or chance.)
I’ve got a lot of new work that I did after we closed the gallery last season, plus I’m painting more in preparation for my exhibit at Sunbury Shores Art & Nature Centre in July. The theme is “Buildings in the Landscape.” I’d be delighted to have you come by, and I’ll give you a tour of the studio, too! I can’t promise that the apple trees will be blooming – that’s the gallery in the painting at the top of this post – but the lupines are beautiful right now.
A Plein Air Painter's Blog 