Oil Painting

I am not sure why I have not got around to writing about these for such a while, but I have been starting to play about with oil paints as a bit of an additional exploration. This is something I am very much finding my feet with, but I have now got a few attempts I am happy to share.

This first one was inspired by the garden of the Duck and Drake in Leeds, which in summer is a rambling morass of coloured flowers against the red-brick walls. Though of course it is not, by any means, I do often think of oil painting as synonymous with impasto techniques and this is where I started here. This is just cheap oil paints from a discount outlet.

I have seen a lot of oil paintings of cherry blossom recently, and wanted to play with my own take on this in these. I liked the scraped, white with a little pastel colour background in on particular painting, and thought I would play with this, and worked dropping tiny amounts of dry Culture Hustle pigments into the wet paint before scraping the paint, leaving a little bit of texture. I bought some Winsor and Newton Winton oils to work on these – unlike watercolours often cheaper oil-paints do not seem too bad, but they are very homogenous and also take an age to dry.

The last painting I am going to include here is a go at the path in The Lizard in Wymondham which has really seemed to take my fancy due to the light.

I am very new to oils and have a deep learning curve ahead in terms of techniques, bit I am quite pleased with this as a very early attempt.

My only real issue with oils is that I have very limited space, particularly for drying and this limits a bit what I can accomplish, and overall I hate cleaning up after working! But (and especially having bought a couple of books with projects in the style of Turner while I was in London) I will come back to this a little more.