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.

How to paint a young child and cuddly toys

This was a recent commission. The challenge was to paint in oils this little lad surrounded by his favourite toys. At just over a year old, he wasn't for sitting still, so I had to resort to large number of photographs to work from. There then followed lots of discussion with his parents to see which, if any, captured him best.
In the end it was a combination of numerous ones which seemed to work best.

The painting was done on MDF board to which I had applied a couple of coats of acrylic gesso. To speed the process, I did the underpainting in acrylics.

I start by simply drawing with a brush and burnt sienna.

I start to lay in blocks of colour.

I tentatively position the features. The cool green of the underpainting is a nice foil to the warmer flesh tones on top. These are white plus yellow ochre, cad red.

Still working in acrylics, I now pay more attention to achieving a likeness, checking proportions and angles.

The temptation is to continue fiddling with the head, but I must move other parts of the painting along.

e.g. clothes, toys, toolbox and garden background.

I am now working in oils, to get the subtlety and softness required.

I am now at the fine tuning stage. Watch this space to see the finished painting and have my techniques explained in greater detail.