Author Archives: Larry Marshall

Oil Painting Is Just Peachy

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The thing I remember most about my dad was the expressions he used to describe his universe.  When something was good it would often be “just peachy.”  Oil painting may 0r may not be an ideal medium but, for me, it’s just peachy.

Like any new medium, however, the early stages are filled with “how do you do…” about it.  For me, that’s a lot of fun but I can see how it might be frustrating for some.  I can draw stuff but everything I’m doing these days is about getting the medium to work so what I’m painting doesn’t really matter much.  I’m also facing a lot of stuff of nature that I haven’t had to think much about before as an urban sketcher.

Texture is one of those things and I was flipping through a book I own called “A Garden Eden,” which is a Taschen compilation of a bunch of botanical drawings and watercolor paintings.  It’s cover-to-cover eye candy.  Anyways, I came across a watercolor of a peach and I was taken by how fuzzy the peach looked.  I’m always surprised by what botanical artist can accomplish and I started thinking about how to do that with oil paint, or any paint for that matter.

In spite of being a complete beginner with oils, I decided to try it.  I drew the peach and its associated branch and leaves onto a 9×12 piece of MDF that I’d primed with gesso.  I was off and running.  The painting?  That was more like being at the 20 mile point of a marathon only rather than hitting a metabolic “wall”, this wall was because I had no idea how to make oil paint fuzzy (grin).

I worked, and worked, trying everything I could.  Mostly what I learned was that patience and stubbornness can go a long way to overcome a lack of skill.  I worked on that peach for at least two hours, but I think it actually looks fuzzy, though not as smooth as I’d like.  Then I had to paint all those leaves.  “How do you do…” Because oil paint dries slowly, that was ok and this is why I have to say that oil paint is “just peachy.”

Out Of My Comfort Zone And Beyond

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I’m not a fan of the view that getting “outside your comfort zone” holds some sort of magic dust that will improve an artist’s abilities, but it is an expression that is heard so often that I might as well run with it.  I’m out of my comfort zone; I’m out on a limb; I’m standing on a precipice.

This shows me trying to calculate where my next step will take me.  Maybe I should be consulting Wiley Coyote.  Before I explain, I need to provide a bit of back story.

Just prior to the pandemic I decided to give gouache a try.  This is mostly because I hold James Gurney in high regard and hang on his every word.  AND, I found that I liked the medium very much, once I learned that treating it like watercolor was a really bad idea (grin).  I also found that it didn’t play well in a pen and ink world because it’s hard to stay inside the lines with it, so you always end up with partially covered lines that, using the technical term, just looks icky.  So, I put my gouache in a box and there they sat for most of the pandemic.

But, as I’ve written recently, I’ve set aside my fountain pens, turned to pencil and I’m trying to shun “lines” in my art, at least for a while.  It occurred to me that maybe it was time to try some gouache again because opaque paints sort of force you away from relying upon lines (see above).

And so I went looking for my box of gouache and I found two things.  Here I have to confess that I’m an art materials junky and my stash is considerable.  What I found were tubes of Winsor & Newton water-mixable oil paints.  I bought those many years ago, decided I was too lazy to deal with the “complicated” (explanation for the quotes to come later) nature of oils and I never even tried them.

This, however, reminded me of watching YouTube videos about water-mixable videos, specifically those of Charlie Hunter who is a fine art guy with a good sense of humor. He was using Cobra water-mixable paints, which are high-end artist grade (same formula as Rembrandt oils for those in the know) and I remembered ordering a set of those paints.

Well, one thing led to another and I’m now trying to figure out how to paint with water-mixable oils.  The notion of using white paint rather than water to lighten my colors is very foreign and I haven’t a clue what consistency to mix the paints.  But I’m also learning that the mythos that suggests that oil painting is complicated truly is a myth and I’m having a lot of fun.

Here’s my first oil painting ever.  It’s supposed to be a flying hot pepper just in case you can’t identify it.  All I was trying to do was see if I could get some 3-dimensionality from oils.  It’s painted on a 6×8 MDF panel.

My first “real” painting (9×12) was this  still life of a couple of my biscuits and a cup of coffee.  I won’t be hanging in the Louvre anytime soon but I absolutely love the working time of oils and the fact that you can work light to dark and dark to light.

Well, I doubt anyone read this far so I’d better stop.  More “real soon.”

Ah…The Meditation That Is Pencil Drawing

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I’ve pulled these books from my library and they now rest on the table next to my reading/TV chair.  The Guptill and Harding books are still the best in my opinion but I like all of these books.  Harding has a great book on drawing trees too but I don’t have that one.

So here I am, pencil in hand, drawing stuff.  While it feels like a new road for me, I have done some pencil drawing in museums during winter, because many museums don’t like the idea of watercolors being sloshed about near the exhibits.  This is when I work with watercolor pencils too, using a water brush. That was back in 2013-2014 though, and mostly I was still trying to figure out how to deal with basic proportions.  Light and shade was mostly foreign to me.

I was walking the other day and found some mushrooms on their last legs I did some tiny sketches of them.  It was hard because they were old and falling apart.  Somehow I related to them (grin).  Anyways, the highlight was that I found some milkweed pods and I brought some home with me.  This was done in my S&B Epsilon 9×12 sketchbook.

Drawing this was… well… peaceful.  I’ve mentioned that I draw slowly regardless of medium.  That’s how this kind of drawing is done.  Pencil books don’t spend time telling you to draw quickly (grin).  The time flew by, however, and I felt refreshed at the end.  On to the next page.  I hope you find my stumbling around with new media at least casually interesting and that you’ll laugh along with me.

Baby Steps Down A New Road

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In my last post, I mentioned that I was laying down my pens (almost) and picking up a pencil.   I’ve taken a baby step or two down this different road by breaking open a hardbound, 8.5×11 size Stillman & Birn Epsilon sketchbook, wrote name and address in it and began.

I did this on the day that Chantal was chopping down our flock of Cup plants.  These are very tall, sunflower-like plants but with many smaller flowers than your typical sunflower.  They get their name by the fact that each branching of the plant creates a “cup” that collects water and the plant absorbs it through soft tissue.  Pretty cool they are and we enjoy them every year.  Anyway, I took the top of one of them and drew it on the first page of my new sketchbook.  A pencil drawer am me.

Out Of My Comfort Zone

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It seems that the art world is full of people saying “get out of your comfort zone” as a way of saying something, though I’m not sure what.  And for a decade I’ve pretty much ignored that advice.

When I came to sketching I was holding a fountain pen.  These days I’m still holding a fountain pen for most of my art.  Talk about a rut, but it is my rut and I like it.  Heck, everyone says that using a pen is the ONLY way to learn to draw.   I’ve never quite followed the logic of that claim, within limits, it has worked for me.  It’s those limits I want to talk about today.

Sketching with pen places a lot of emphasis on line and contour.  That’s ok, because we’ve always got watercolors to provide color, right?  The problem with all this is that the pen sketch becomes an end product.  You might think about watercolor while making a pen drawing but it’s still all about edges and contours.

Pencil drivers are different.  They shade their drawings.  In doing so they have to think more in three dimensions more than do pen drivers.  They discuss things like “turning the form” and other stuff like that.  So do all painters, including watercolorists, who don’t lay down lines as THE thing that defines their drawing.  Shari Blaukopf’s workshops taught me just how big a switch in mindset takes place when you to a pen and wash sketch but with a pencil instead.

I’m not talking here about right or wrong but rather about me “getting out of my comfort zone” for a reason, and that reason is to walk on the wild side of light and shade, turning forms, and gaining a better sense of creating 3D images.  It’s going to be a long and somewhat clumsy road for me I’m kind of excited about the prospects.

I did this rather quick (10 min) sketch of a basswood tree (3×5) while on a walk.  It was fun to scrumble in masses rather than drawing my typical Brillo pad trees.  I like the result and plan to draw a bunch more trees, though Quebec trees are dropping their leaves en masse right now.

I decided to draw a portrait.  I don’t draw portraits which is something of a Catch-22.  I don’t know how, they are never very good and so I don’t draw portraits.  More getting outside my comfort zone I guess.  I also learned something about pencil.  Stillman & Birn Beta is too textured to draw with pencil.  See…already learning.  Oh, and I can’t shade to save my life.  Guess that’s why I’m out here… out of my comfort zone.