Ingrid Christensen -A Painter's Progress

I pulled out the cherry blossom robe again in honour of spring and because I find that painting the same thing over and over forces me to look for new ways to depict it.  This robe has inspired a lot of experimentation in palettes and paint applications.
The version at the bottom is how the painting looked after my first attempt.  It was straight forward alla prima painting and I thought the result was "ok" - which is damning with faint praise.  
The biggest issue was the sap green background.  That was an experiment in transparent darks that didn't end up suiting my aesthetic.  Sap is a transparent pigment and its rich colour and glassy transparency looked unpleasant, refusing to integrate with the opacity and impasto of the figure and robe.   The piece wasn't bad enough to scrape off, so I let it dry and thought about it for a couple of weeks. 
A clue for the next step came from the upper right corner of the painting in which I'd scumbled some cool, opaque gre…

Last weekend I taught a "Painting from Photos" workshop to a keen bunch of painters.  One of the concepts we worked on was the power of edges, and how to break out of the camera's viewpoint when rendering them.

Photos give us the idea that an entire scene can be in crisp focus, no matter how broad, but that's only true if you're a camera.  Humans don't see like that.  What we see is soft edges with only a tiny fraction of sharpness - maybe 2% of our visual field.  Maybe 1%.  It's actually surprising to realize how indistinct our visual experience is.  Too often, though, we forget this when we paint, especially if we're painting from photos.  We end up creating painted photos instead of paintings that show our  view of the world.




The piece above shows how few hard edges you need to make a believable painting.  I've clustered the edges in the focal area near the eye and the upper part of the face while diminishing the edges of forms as they get fu…

I'm always looking for a new way to make marks and achieve effects in oil paint, and always coming up against its one firm rule: "fat over lean".  Following this rule will ensure that your paintings age as well as possible instead of cracking to pieces in a potentially short period of time; every oil painter's nightmare.

Essentially, "oilier over less oily", the fat over lean rule should be easy to apply, but it's actually very complex.  A brief look at oil painting forums devoted to this subject will tell you that there are a lot of interpretations happening in studios.

If you're building a painting wet-in-wet, it's straightforward: less paint and added oil in the lower layer and more paint and added oil in the upper layers.  Because oil paint is pigment bound in vegetable oil, applying a thicker layer of paint automatically means that it will be fatter (oilier) than a thin application.

I dilute my first layer with a 50/50 mix of oil and odour…

I've had many emails over the years asking me how I learned to paint and for resource suggestions, so I thought I'd list the books that were the most influential to me when I was learning.  I made that sound past tense, but I'm actually still learning and always will be. 

First, a confession: I look at the pictures in most art books, and only skim the texts, and I have yet to do an exercise from any how-to book that I own.  It's a personal failing.

Here are some books that I actually did read because they were so informative and relevant:

- Richard Schmid:"Alla Prima".  It's a sweeping, common sense, and generous survey of oil painting methods and materials.  It taught me how to choose my palette, start and build a painting, and troubleshoot the inevitable hiccups that every painting presents.

- Charles Reid: "Painting What You Want to See".  My aesthetic is more aligned with Reid's than Schmid's which makes this book especially useful …

I've been experimenting with lower chroma pigments lately because I like the subdued greys that they produce, and because I've become overly familiar with my usual palette.  Knowing exactly what my colours will do has diminished some of the magic of their application, so, in a wild and crazy move, I've been substituting earth pigments for one or all of the usual colours and seeing what happens.  Who says painters are boring?
(In case you're wondering, the usual 6 are: cad red light, alizarin permanent, ultramarine blue, pthalo blue, cad yellow, and cad yellow light + white)
This piece was done on a cool-toned support using a low chroma palette of Indian red, yellow ochre, and a blue-black made from ivory black mixed with ultramarine blue.  Toward the end, I added a smidge of cad red light to achieve those warm pieces in the clothing and to liven up the lip colour.  
I'm a fan of the limited palette, but if I need a certain effect, I won't hesitate to drop anot…

I got together with good friends last week for an afternoon of challenging painting.  We were all using a Zorn palette - a subtle, greyed palette made famous when the 19th century Swedish artist, Anders Zorn, used of it to convey the cool tones of his world.  
The palette uses cad red light or medium, yellow ochre, ivory black, and white.  It's great for conveying powerful reds and strong darks, but don't ask for a spring green or a blue, summer sky.  Ivory black acts like a blue in this scheme, but it's more like the illusion of blue, than the colour itself.  Add to this the fact that all of the pigments are opaque and prone to making mud, and you can see that it really was a challenge.
Our model had a deep tan and was under warm lights in a white-walled studio.  That meant that we had to mix an array of orange from light to dark and warm to cool to show the planes of her body, as well as figure out how to paint the effect of the cool wall colour reflecting off the areas…