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