Making Paintings

Process videos and a behind the scenes look at the painting I’m currently working on.

It’s summer break at my house, finally!  To celebrate our freedom, we all took some time to indulge in our favorite activities with reckless abandon.  For me, that means making art.  I usually share my sketches with you, but today I’ll share a painting I’m working on and the process behind the making of it. The video quality is not great, I am filming with my left hand and painting with my right, so I am sorry.  But for those who are interested in the process, this will give you some idea of how I paint. 

There are most definitely better painters out there and probably better methods, but somehow this is how I paint, learned by trial and error.  I first learned to paint with oil almost two decades ago and though I enjoyed it, I have not used it since. I switched to acrylic because it is more compatible for use in a home environment; it cleans up easier, dries faster, is less toxic. Someday I want to switch back to oil, though I’ve long forgotten how to paint with it by now.  I wonder if switching back to oil is as easy as remembering how to ride a bike (another activity I’ve not done in….decades)?

So, this first video is just me mixing paint, I make a huge amount of what I refer to as sludge, which is just every single color on my palette plus a slow drying medium.

I mix an enormous amount and then coat my whole canvas in that, which this second video shows the start of.

Once the canvas is coated, the fun part starts— laying out the painting. I was pretty careful laying this one out, but sometimes I am purposefully careless and gestural just for fun. I use my palette knife to carve out the bones, and it’s wonderful because the paint is wet and if I don’t like something, I can just smooth it back out. Sometimes I smooth out the whole entire canvas and start completely over! It’s a very forgiving method. Here is a video of that process:

You can see me mess up and fix it a few times. The canvas looked like this when I was pleased with the carving out part:

I enjoy the paintings at this raw stage and I will sometimes just add a few pops of color and call it done. But that’s not what I’m after in this painting. In the next video I’ll add a little color. I started with the apple because it’s closest spatially to me. In general I try to add in all my darks first.

I do try to work the whole canvas in each stage, so for example I would not just paint the apple to completion then work on the oranges until completion, I work round and round the whole canvas. I mix a little of the original sludge into every color, it promotes unity, cohesion, and harmony. I start with larger brushes and work down to smaller brushes with each layer. In this last video, you can see how it is progressing:

I spent about six hours on the painting and it is not done. So consequently, I have a huge mess in my room and an urgent need to paint, but I will have to wait until tonight when my kids are in bed; I cannot make serious art when my kids are awake.

And, lastly, here is an update on the other mixed media art I made, if any of you saw it on Notes:

I added some color, and its name is “Just So You Know, I Was Thinking of You”. The idea behind it was a 20 plus year tradition of giving the clouds messages to deliver to my husband when he works out of town.

This playful kind of art is often like an appetizer for me, it takes the edge off and helps me limber up so I can settle down and focus on the main course…in this case my still life work.

Thank you all for coming along on this journey with me, and thank you to those who were kindly requesting videos, it was fun to document the creation process and to look back on it. Please let me know if you enjoyed this different sort of newsletter, or if you have any questions I’ll be happy to try to answer. I’m sure I’ll be back with more sketches soon, though perhaps not very scheduled—summer break is really pretty busy with projects and a thorough house cleaning and organizing plus researching and choosing next year’s school curriculum.

Have a fantastic week, and thank you again, I so appreciate you and I’m grateful to you for all the support and encouragement.

-Jenn

P.S. If you’d like to see more of my art, Etsy has a bunch of originals and there are a few links to other stuff here.