Sunday 27 March 2016

Helmsley Castle

This is the first in a series of paintings that I have ideas for, based on some of the castles and abbeys of North Yorkshire. This is a graphite drawing with encaustic and a little oil.



Helmsley Castle

Friday 25 March 2016

Singing in the Rain.

Since we moved house and no longer have the garden right outside the back door and we've missed feeding the birds. We had a number of crows; a murder if you will, Jake the limping magpie, a pair of woodpeckers, bullfinches, various other finches and tits, a gang of starlings (like teenagers in hoodies), and a range of other birds. Still, I've got a bigger studio and we're just across the road from a pie shop. Every cloud.
This is a mixed media piece of a young crow waiting to be fed. It started out as a charcoal drawing which I then worked encaustic wax into it. 

Crow

Sunday 20 March 2016

The Painting With No Name.


This is a small abstract that I completed a week or two ago. It shows the kind of luminosity and translucency that Encaustic can give. It also smell of honey whilst you are heating it. What's not to like! 
At the moment I am experimenting with using the wax with other materials, particularly drawing. As a result I am working with compressed charcoal and graphite sticks - two things that I've never really bothered with before. This painting however is made with wax, and glazes of oil paint.
Untitled.
oil and wax.

Tuesday 15 March 2016

Oiling Out.


This is the first painting oil that I have done since we moved house. I have done a few A2 charcoal drawings and plenty of encaustics, but this is the first oil. It is  a scene from a regular dog-walking site of ours - Yearsley Woods.
This winter, which the forcasters predicted would be long and harsh, was in-fact just wet...very wet. This painting is of a small waterfall, where the excess water runs off into a culvert directed under the path. Most days that Sara and I took Hector there were fairly dark and damp; I tried to capture that feeling. I used quite thin oils, 'watered down' with distilled turpentine, building up layers in a similar way to working in watercolour. There is some slightly more impasto work on the main focal point, although it never gets very thick.
The problem with thinning down oil paints with spirits, is that the colours tend to sink and look flat. It also tends to create a 'haze'. To get round this I 'oiled out' the entire canvas (about 4 feet by 3 feet), using oil medium. You can see from the photos below what a difference this makes in terms of lifting the colours again. I could have used varnish, and probably would have used varnish, but for the fact that there are areas where I had thinned some paints down with oil instead of turps', so the finish was uneven. Varnish wouldn't have sorted this...but oiling out does. The oiling took well over a month to dry.
The canvas now hangs in the Look Gallery in Helmsley.


 Oiling out close-up

Oiling out - half way.

Yearsley Woods
oil on canvas