12 minute read
Paint Surfaces
PAINT SURFACES 2. Super Impasto Our former Artists of the Year winner Norman Long continues his look at how to create interesting surface textures with a guide to a thicker form of impasto painting
One of the biggest obstacles to creating a great surface is a reluctance to use generous amounts of paint. This month’s challenge should shock you out of any restricting habits. I am suggesting that you use frightening amounts of paint, more than you have ever used before.
I often ask my students to test the limits of their taste in painting. How much strong colour before your stomach turns? Can you make some really ugly brushstrokes and leave them in? That push to excess extends to paint quantity. What may look like frightening mounds of paint to you or I would be mere stains to someone like George Rowlett, the Scottish impasto artist.
There are certain obstacles to this approach, not least of which is the cost of oil paint. If you get hooked on this technique, I suggest searching online for the best price on large tubes of inexpensive paint, such as those from Winsor & Newton’s Winton range. Oil painters have also devised ingenious ways of saving paint from one session to the next, the rationale being that if you never waste any
paint, you can paint like a millionaire.
It’s not just clean piles of paint that are worth preserving. At the end of a session, I scrape my “palette mud” into distinct piles of neutral colours for use in the next painting. When I find myself overrun with saved paint, those muddy colours are ideal for making textured surfaces on which to paint. Creating these grounds of various colours and textures without concern for subject matter is tremendous fun. Once dry, you simply have to wait for the perfect marriage of surface and subject.
An interesting ground can save a lot of work. I find that some subjects can be teased out of a canvas covered in random smears of leftover paint, while Arjun was painted on a mottled surface that I had applied with a palette knife. I was able to drag paint across the surface to produce some lively textural effects in places, while also leaving large areas untouched. If you really want to pile on the paint, a heavily textured surface also provides good “tooth” onto which the subsequent layers of paint can attach.
This “super impasto” is a truly liberating technique of working with large quantities of paint. Armed with a heavily loaded brush or knife, we are forced to interpret the subject in terms of simple shapes, letting the paint itself fall into the most surprisingly delicious accidents.
How far you take things is up to you. I developed my landscape in the demo over the page to a certain level of realism, but equally I could have left it at an earlier stage for a more expressionistic feel.
HOW TO MAKE… A TEXTURED GROUND
1. To create a thick, textured base layer, I spread leftover oil paint over a gesso-primed board using a palette knife. 2. I could have stopped there, but I decided to add further texture by lightly dragging a soft brush through the paint. 3. I added a stippled effect in places by “tonking” – lightly applying paper to the wet paint and lifting it off.
DEMO
Loading up the surface
Autumn by the Ribble was painted en plein air, using a brown oil ground [see above] which I had prepared a few weeks before. When painting outdoors, I like to bring boards of different shapes, colours and textures and select the most suitable for the subject. My clear, horizontal palette was laid out with colours around the edges, including multiple piles of primaries and white (1). This allowed for strong, clean colour mixes at the outset, which naturally muddied themselves as the painting progressed. Piles of “palette mud” saved from previous sessions were placed inside the pure colours. On the left are reddish neutrals moving down to bluish neutrals. On the right, warm to cool neutrals, with a few greens at the bottom. 2
The trick to good thick impasto painting is to load the canvas with as much paint as possible, as soon as possible – think of it as “paint first, draw later”. I took the time to make a rapid thumbnail sketch in my sketchbook first, then placed just a few lines on the canvas to indicate the major divisions before mixing large batches of colour with a palette knife. Mixing with a knife is slower than a brush, but it is easier to generate larger quantities. Avoid mixing pigment on your palette too thoroughly, however, if you want to leave some interesting streaks in the paint application.
After about 40 minutes of piling on paint with a palette knife and large brushes (2), it was time to slow down and assess what was needed. Canvas
and palette were both covered in thick paint, so carrying on at this pace would lead to mud. I cleaned the palette instead and refreshed it with piles of clean colour, which also provided a useful break from looking at the painting. When I was done cleaning, I turned the painting upside down, stood well back and assessed the progress in a pocket mirror.
What struck me was that the surface was uniformly thick and rough (3). As I continued to work on the shapes and colours of the painting, I also wanted to consider the balance of textures. Using a knife to flatten the impasto in recessive areas of the subject helped to reinforce the sense of depth and also created variety (4).
Paint application can occasionally be made to mimic the texture of the subject itself. The sky and water were relatively smooth, the foreground grasses were thick and jagged, while the finest branches were suggested with a scratchy brush (5).
5 4
EXERCISE
Recycling your paint
Aim
This month’s exercise gives you three ways to beef up the surface of your oil paintings.
Materials
• A selection of affordable oil or acrylic paints • A selection of paint brushes and palette knives • A hard-wearing support (try a wood panel or flexible linen canvas) • Cling film • Sandpaper (optional)
ABOVE Loading the canvas with paint early on can guarantee a rich and sensual surface
RIGHT Oil paint preserved in cling film parcels can be re-used as a ground Subject
Choose a subject you can both paint from life and also have a strong emotional connection towards – these elements will encourage you to be more expressive with the paint.
What you will learn
Have you ever finished a painting, only to be disappointed by the meanness of the surface?
This exercise will show you simple ways to save wastage, which will free you up to be more generous with your application later. Process
Next month:
any primed support (though Bring abandoned try to avoid extremely dark paintings to life mixtures). Enjoy experimenting by reworking the with the application, using surface knives, brushes and paper to achieve your own distinctive textures. The palette knife is also useful for flattening areas that become too pronounced. Try preparing a few supports in one go and let them dry for at least three weeks before you paint over them. Before painting on your dried oil ground, rub the edge of a palette knife or a sheet of sandpaper over the surface to remove any loose ridges of paint. If the texture is too smooth, use rough sandpaper to create some “tooth”. If the surface is too rough in an area of your painting that you want to be more delicate (such as a face), you can also sand it smooth. Remember you will be painting over dried oil paint, so if you need to dilute the subsequent layers, use a medium including oil not just solvent. When you finally start painting from your subject, challenge yourself This exercise begins at the end of to load the canvas with prodigious your previous painting session. Get in amounts of paint in the first hour. the habit of saving leftover paint by That way, no matter what the placing it on a piece of glass inside a outcome, you will guarantee a tin and storing it in the freezer. If the rich and sensual surface. freezer’s full, make cling film parcels Norman’s book, Oils: Techniques and that can be easily cut open instead. Tutorials for the Complete Beginner,
That leftover oil paint can then be is published by GMC Publications. used to create a coloured ground on www.normanlongartist.com
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