Some time back I was in the shop picking up canvas and wood panels when I saw some small 8 x 10 x 1.5 inch stretched canvases laying out on a table for a very good price. I decided they would be great for trying out oil and cold wax medium paintings so I took them home and promptly added some light weight modeling paste on them. Set aside, I got busy with other things and did not get back to them until yesterday.

I got them out for working today. It took me forever to look for all the things I would need to work with oil……..turpenoid, the wax medium along with some alkyd medium I’d heard was good to mix with the wax medium if you are working on canvas. All those oil paints I had that dated to way back when. I am not joking when I say that some of these paints actually were purchased in the mid 60’s…..Permanent Pigments, remember them! Of course I have many others of various brands. I even have some that had never been taken out of their boxes. Talk about a supply hoarder.

I had a difficult time opening some of the tubes. A few were tossed due to no longer being viable……..by that I mean they would not come out of the tube :>/ Of course if they had been some weird consistency I would have had to toss them as well. I laid out pretty much all the colors or their close relatives on the palette………got out all the spreaders and knives I could find along with any other kind of marking/scraping tools. As if I am going to do much with this little bitty canvases. I put blue tape all around the sides to protect them from messy paint. Yeah, it’s messy and I had forgotten. More due to not drying fast so you get sticky hands and brush/knife handles. I don’t know what I will do with plain white sides. However, that is putting the cart before the horse isn’t it?  First I have to make something.

So… I set off putting some orange and the medium mixture on with a big palette knife… hum, with all that texture I had to end up putting in a little brush work to get it in the texture. SO… then I had three orange tones and three of various purples. Oops, still kind of wet but this mixture does get set up fairly fast. I’m not really liking these small panels … I’m used to moving my whole arm on large paintings. I got to diddling around and ended up with the first one looking like a little impressionist landscape with not a lot going for it in the value department. Of course, impressionism is not known for values…….dark ones that is.

I don’t know how I got the little landscape one in the images twice….anyway, it is now long gone and turned into that red one in the next layer.

Oh my… the studio smells like a studio with that faint whiff of oil paint in the air.

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