Painting with a palette knife.

Painting with a palette knife can be great fun. With it,  you can achieve a variety of bold textures you simply cannot get with a brush. Colours are mixed on the canvas and the resulting, often unexpected combinations, can surprise, and excite and be used to great advantage.
Paint is used straight from the tube and to increase volume one can also add things like Winsor & newton's Oleopasto or Rowney's texture paste.


To demonstrate some of the effects that can be achieved, I show a painting I did earlier this year.  "Colin's shed" . It is a large work measuring 48" x 36" done on MDF board.

 

In the above, you can see the rich textures and ridges  created with a large trowel -like palette knife. Titanium white, Cobalt blue, pthalo blue and  Old Holland violet grey were all mixed and scraped around on the panel.

Another section of the painting began in an even bolder way. Scratching  into the paint, scraping bits off, sanding it down.

 

And again

 Doesn't look like much at the moment.

Let me show you a larger section of the painting.

Or this

At this stage I had to decide whether to simply use a palette knife or to combine it with brushwork and a more traditional approach.  I decided to do the latter, but still retain many sections which were looser and more spontaneous.

And so to the finished painting.

The first image above is of a section of  the roughly textured , plastered wall. The second is of the pile of logs by the stove.

The third, is the underpainting for the pile of assorted bric a brac on the workbench.

Sections of the painting in closer detail.

Or

As you can see, "Colin's Shed" is an almost magical place. Within it is an array of memorabilia, clutter and in some places downright junk. But it is a warm and inviting retreat, a place where one can feast one's eyes and take journeys into the imagination.

Fun with mixed media

On occasions it is fun to try something completely new.

Recently, I came across the remains of this wonderfully old gnarled tree. It was tortured and twisted, and bleached by the elements. I really felt I had to draw or paint it.

What would be the best approach? In the end, I decided to just play and enjoy the process of seeing how things developed.

I primed a piece of MDF with acrylic gesso and blocked it in with charcoal. But it lacked the power and texture that I wanted. I added acrylic texture paste , modelling it with brush and palette knife to suggest the contours of the tree. When dry, I dragged charcoal across the surface. Black lava , sand, and glass bead texture gels also became part of the process. White conte chalk and black and white acrylic paint were used as well.

Below are a couple of close ups of the effects achieved.







Finally, the finished work, measuring 30" x20"