Clouds Study

Here is a study of rain clouds on Canson canvas paper without gesso priming. I used Windsor & Newton Artisan oils. Canvas paper absorbs too much oil without gesso  and the colors looked flat.

 Rare rain

8x10"

Portrait of a Girl

Here a small oils monochrome painting in Raw Umber. Dahler Rowney Georgian .

Hope

6x8" Canson paper canvas.

Gouache on Gessoed Canvas

Here is an example of a 6x8" landscape on canvas mounted on illustration board.

 Hidden Creek

Dick Blick Premium Tempera

Imaginative Landscape

This is a small painting on poster board cover with two coats of gesso.

  After the Storm. 

Poster Paint. 3x4"

Brush Sketching

Gouache is similar to watercolor in that both are water media but gouache's pigments are combined with chalk for opacity. With the addition of chalk, the ratio of pigments to arabic gum and water is much higher than in watercolor. This makes gouache heavier and more opaque, with greater reflective properties. One difficulty in mastering Gouache is that most of the time it dries to a different value than when it is wet. Dark colors dry lighter and light colors dry darker. This makes it difficult to control values in a painting. Nevertheless, gouache dries to a beautiful matte finish, is very durable, and dries very quickly.

In the sketches above I used gouache's range of possibilities from watercolor transparency all the way to very opaque. This time I used a direct approach - straight brushwork, without pencil sketching.

Sketches by Oceanside Pier

Black and white Gouache on Poster board.

Tonal Painting

If the painting works [e.i. has a balanced and pleasing tonal distribution] in black and white it will look fine in color.

 German Village, 12x14". Oil on Canson Canvas Paper.

Here is another tonal painting of a village outside Rome, Italy.

Rendering Architecture

Here a 4" x 5" study where more accurate architecture and the correct values of  the buildings are essential.

 

Quiet Afternoon

Poster Tempera

City Composition Stems

The amount of detail that a typical cityscape has makes harder to focus on rendering correct values. Here I used the values of the bridge as reference to determine the correct values of the surrounding houses. Painted with Black and White Dick Blick's Premium Tempera and Vegetable Glycerin.

Counterbalance or Steel Yard Composition Stem

This one is a little over 6" x 4". Here I attempted to capture more of the true light of the scene. To that effect I did not use pure black. Notice that the medium dark mass of the slop and the small trees on the left counterbalance the dark shapes of the foreground tree. This is a well tested successful composition format.

 

End of the Tree Line 

Premium Tempera on hotpress watercolor paper

B & W Landscape Comps

Here is a set of landscape comps made with  Dick Blick's Premium Tempera as a substitute for the much more expensive Lukas and Utrecht brands. I used hot-press watercolor paper as a surface.To slow down drying time I use Vegetable Glycerin USP 100% pure. Glycerin also helps tempera to stay flexible.

 

These compositions are no larger than 2" x 2-1/4". The comps show their relative size to one another.

Doing black and white composition allows me to understand the relative values, identify the best composition  and potential problems in placement and size of the main elements. If the values are placed accurately, It also gives me an idea of the particular "light" of the landscape. 

Gouache and Tempera, unpretentious as they are, are a very sophisticated media, capable of very fine detail. They also are a good stepping-stone toward learning to paint with oils.