So I thought I would give a little behind the scenes look into not only how I go about painting but also what tools I use in doing this. This first image is of my pallet. I mix my paints on an old MDF board with a sheet of wax paper tapped down over the top. Usually I place the blobs of paint across the top, but sometimes I will haphazardly place paint all over the pallet. I paint using what is called a limited pallet. The colors are from left to right. Burnt Sienna (reddish brown), Burnt Umber (dark brown), Ultramarine Deep (blue), Titanium White, Cadmium Red Deep, Cadmium Yellow Light, Indian Yellow (a warm orange-yellow) and sometimes Dioxazine Purple. Another thing I need to point out is that I do not use any black when I paint. Black is the anti-color, it kills color, mutes it.
The brushes lay on the left. I have a drawer full of brushes in various states of use from new to desperately need to be thrown out bellow my pallet. But these are the one I'm am currently using.
The top left is my pallet knife that I use to mix my paints to get all the various colors I paint with. Sometimes I just use the brush I am holding to mix a color I need.
The spray can on top of the pallet is a fixative I use to help solidify a layer of paint so I can work faster.
The green-brown looking jar on the top right side of the pallet is full of mineral spirits. It is used to clean my brushes. It has a spring in it that I scrub the bristles on, thus aiding to the cleaning.
Next over is a container that says linseed oil but contains more mineral spirits.
And finally is a yellowish jar filled with an even mix of Galkyn and mineral spirits. This is my Medium. I use it to thin my paints to an almost water color consistency.
There are three types of brushes that I know of or that I use. Flat, Bright, and Round. I for the most part just use flat for the bulk of my painting. And round for all of my liner work. I've tried Bright brushes off and on, but i don't like how they move the paint around. Just a little too smudgy for me.
This first set of brushes I either just use on Large paintings (24 x 30 and up) or in some instances I'll use them to blend two or more colors together. These range in size from one and a half to three inches in sizes.
This next set of brushes I use primarily for painting in large areas. For all of my temple paintings I used these brushes to paint in my sky's for example. The brush on the left is a new never been used brush. The brush in the middle is the same brush just four months of use. As you can see all of my brushes slowly spread out, no matter how well I clean them. From time to time I'll even use an ultra-sonic cleaning tool to clean my brushes. But in the end they all spread.
These next set of bushes are the same as the above brushes just smaller. I try to work with the largest brush I can get away with in an area so as to spend less time noodling away an area. Although recently I've tried using smaller brushes to improve the over all texture of my paintings. With all of my paintings which brush I use is really based mostly on how lazy I'm feeling and over all feel. Every artist has his or her own preference to brushes based on there own approach to painting. The only real way you can learn this for your self is to just jump in and start painting. I once had a dean of the art department at the University of Utah tell me that if you want to learn to paint, then just go and paint. The two best teachers for painting are Trial and Error. Experimentation is how I learned to paint ( and Greg Olsen's patience).
The last set of brushes are my Liner brushes. To the left is a new brush, the middle is one that has had it as a liner and the right one is one in which I trimmed down after it had spread. So that is the future of the middle one. I'm often trimming my brushes, especially when they start to spread out.
