If James Says It's OK...

My most recent experiments are still too sticky to scan--water-mixable oil paint portraits from old B&W photos. But there have been two brand new adventures:

1. I "won," (ticket raffle auction) a nice set of Windsor & Newton artists oil paints a year ago. Too precious to open for my meager skill level, I set them aside and began to paint some portraits in my old water-mixable oils, thinking I'd improve a little before cracking out the nice set. Yesterday, thinking it was dumb to save them forever, I went in search of my old can of terp, and found...the bag of old oil paints I'd nearly thrown out a few years ago.  A very limited palette*, but I brought up an ancestor photo and had some fun (to be posted in the near future. Maybe.)

2. James Gurney wrote in his blog about the tradition of copying the masters, and the value of that. So today, I set out to do some copying with the limited palette. Instead of an "old master," I chose to copy from Jennifer Balkan, who I consider a new master--an artist of immense skill and talent. I won't be showing the result, because it's from her vision, but I am fairly pleased.

* black, alizarin crimson, burnt umber, cerulean, golden ochre. No white, so I used the water-mixable white.

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