Gluing Linen to Panels

Sometimes I paint on linen taped to boards. I often do this when I'm sketching or going to an open studio where I might not want to spend my time and money stretching linen or using a good panel in case my work ends up being something I might not want to save. You could tape your linen to foamcore to lighten the weight of panels when you head out to paint the landscape (thank you, Alex Tyng).

Another reason to do alla prima work on a taped-down piece of linen is that I don't always get the composition exactly the way I want it. For example, if I'm painting a profile, I'll want to put the head on the canvas so that there is plenty of "looking space" in the direction where the sitter is looking. It's annoying to be two hours into a portrait head study and find out you should have moved the head an inch or so to the right. This kind of thing drives me crazy. I hate not getting the design right on the canvas! I often start the whole thing over if that happens.

So, let's say you have a painting on a piece of linen and you want to glue it to a panel. Measure out the dimensions on the linen and then cut around the piece - give yourself an inch or so for the final cut, don't cut the piece exactly to the size of the board and then try to glue it down so the edges match, it will drive you insane.

 Piece of masonite (I think this might be Ampersand board) on the left, linen on the right, on top of a scrap board so I don't carve into my nice table.

I put matte acrylic medium on a sponge and I wipe it on both the board and the back of the linen. Then I put the jelly side of the board to the jelly side of the linen. I push down with my hands and then I flip the jelly sandwich over.

My skull is stolen from the novel Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. Not to be confused with the novel (and movie) The Lord of the Rings  by J. R. Tolkien, which is another thing entirely. This is not my own skull, either, I have more of an overbite.

I flip the painting over and put tissue paper on top of the paint. Then I roll the painting with a rubber brayer, being careful around any impasto areas. 

Then I flip the whole thing over again and put heavy books on top to weigh it all down overnight, so it's a little like salt-and-dill-cured gravlax, if you've ever made that. I always hope that some osmosis will take place and some art wisdom will seep down into my paintings. As you can see below, in this case I had a book about Sorolla and one by Vincent Desiderio. I recommend both of these books to read, not just for pressing.

Let your sandwich dry overnight and then you're ready for the final trim with a sharp x-acto blade. Be careful! 

Sometimes I wrap these boards like tidy packages, with neat little hospital corners, but it's much more sticky and fiddly. If you have had the foresight to see if the board fits into your frame properly, you may need to add the tiny bit of fabric afforded by the fold. Framemakers are maddeningly non-uniform in their ideas of what constitutes a proper size frame for, say, a 20 x 16 painting, one of my favorite sizes. One of the bad things that can happen is that the whole belabored board and linen sandwich is too big for your too-tight frame, and like Cinderella's evil stepsisters on confronting that ridiculous glass Barbie shoe, you'll be forced to make a Solomonic judgment on what to do about it.

A Kickstarter Project: The Miira View Frame

I love the idea of a couple of determined artists getting together to create a product that is useful to artists and will create work for local people. If you haven't used Kickstarter before, I recommend you take a look to see all the dreams that are out there and see if you can do something to help projects you can wrap your head around.

I don't know these artists, but I think their idea - a plastic viewfinder with magnetic grids - would be an extremely useful tool. I would like to think that somewhere a covey of earnest, thoughtful children will be finding angles with magnets and squinting down.

This company is also developing an iphone app that does the same thing. I will probably get one of these too but I think it is a good idea to put the plastic grids into production. I think I'd rather use the plastic grid during the course of planning a painting.

A lot of artists begin their paintings by developing some kind of compositional gridding system to help them plan the design of the picture plane, in addition to a means to find angles, copy subjects to scale or drawings scaled up to transfer to the canvas. That's the subject of a later post, I guess.

If you think of Oklahoma as a vague fly-over state, it's a state filled with very nice people who have to put up with tornadoes, weather extremes and people bursting into that song "Ohhhk-lahoma" who only know the first line of the song.

Here's the video for the Miira View Frame (their website is here) - please fund this because I would really like to own one of these!

Clamps and Palettes

There's so much good technical information about oil painting on the internet right now that it's hard to come up with new or useful ideas to share with other artists, but I'll share a few things I do just in case it's new to anybody and might help. Also, I have stolen ideas from a lot of other artists, so apologies if I have stolen an idea from you and forget to credit you and besides, you probably stole it yourself from somebody, didn't you?

 I should clean this palette up a little before I post it, but here you have it as I used it yesterday. Usually I have a primitive painting string set up, with three to five values of a color per blob, so this palette is exceptionally messy, even for me.

Frequently I like to move a palette to the painting while I work on small passages, taking the mountain to Mohammed, so to speak. Clamping the palette to the easel works well for me. Here I'm using a double-hinged Manfrotto clamp, available at friendly internet mega photo stores everywhere.

You can also do this with a larger palette but you'll probably need a couple of clamps. The big benefit to this method is that you have your palette and your painting in the same light. It also helps the mind skip easily from the painting to the palette when you're trying to manage subtle passages in modelling, for example, and keeps the mind from skipping to other thoughts, such as, "peanut butter again for lunch?" . My paints are not usually very runny but if they are, you can put a piece of duct tape along the bottom ridge of the palette to keep paint from sliding onto your shoes or your floor. (Speaking of floors, I paint while standing on a rubber mat. It makes a big difference to do that when you are standing for several hours.)

(As while as I'm digressing, I might as well mention that I have a cuckoo clock that goes off, as they tend to do, every hour. This signals me that I should walk around, have some water, do some pushups, check Facebook - just kidding, don't check Facebook! -  use that noise as a signal to get away from your painting for a little bit and look at it afresh. If you're going down the wrong path it's better to know sooner rather than later. If you don't have a cuckoo clock, use a timer. I don't have a real cuckoo clock, it's a little plastic clock where a car comes out of a tunnel and beeps. I use timers for a lot of things since I tend to get too focused on working and then I forget to do all the other things I'm supposed to do.)

Clamping your palette keeps your left hand free-ish (I'm right handed so I have a brush in my right hand). I have a glove on my left hand and it's usually holding a scrap of towelling. I still bump into my palette when I lean over it to noodle around on the painting, but I'm getting better at this.

The shiny glob on the palette is Oleogel, a terrific medium by Natural Pigments and discussed at length by the wonderful Kate Stone at Painting Stuff to Look Like Stuff. I buy mine in a can and then tube it, it's cheaper that way. One of the good things about Oleogel is that it won't run down a tilted palette and stays happily in its glob shape until you need it.

"Vanishing Point", a Book on Perspective by Jason Cheeseman-Meyer

Front cover of  "Vanishing Point: Perspective for Comics From the Ground Up", by Jason Cheeseman-Meyer. The book from Amazon is available here.

This is a terrific book for all artists, not just the ones interested in comic book illustration or animation. Cheeseman-Meyer's instructions are clear and easy to follow for all artists, including ones like myself who need to be led kicking and screaming through subjects involving terms like "diagonal bisecting lines".

And by the way, I have a nice collection of animation and cartooning books in my art library, not as many as in my fine art book collection, but enough to make me opinionated about artists needing to know at least some of the elements of "illustration" in their art training. It all depends on what you will need to say in your art - you'll need to find the technical tools to help you say it.

Cheeseman-Meyer is conversational and excellent at explaining things like cone of vision, where to put the horizon line and vanishing points. He tackles many concepts, including the straightforward ones like ellipses.

I hope you can read these pages, they're from my scanner.

The artist moves on to include some dazzling concepts which one prays one will not be tested on, such as five-point perspective (don't worry, he builds up to this page in very convincing fashion):

Please go onto Amazon and read the reviews of this book. Many of the reviewers seem to be cartoonists and illustrators who use these concepts all the time and really know what they're talking about.

Are You the Artist or Are You the Muse?

This ad was in a magazine that landed in my mailbox. If you can't read the typeface, it says,

"Introducing
Modern Muse
Be an Inspiration".

I blocked out the name of the company because  I'll never forgive the company for creating Youth Dew. If somebody gets on an elevator I'm riding in with Youth Dew applied as her perfume, I have to get off at the next floor or I'm sick to my stomach. It's like an airborne ipecac syrup.  I think Youth Dew is an ingredient in chemical weapons.

I think that the intent of this ad is to imply to women that if they use Modern Muse perfume, they will appeal to an artist (maybe not visual artists, but some kind of creative person) and be remembered as the mesmerizing woman who inspired great art, music, a riveting reality TV series or maybe a new designer handbag.

I love to paint women and I love people who smell nice - and I'd like to smell nice, too -  but I think the women who are tempted by this ad into buying this perfume don't want to attract artists like me, they want to attract and inspire the male artist. Don't you think this ad implies that a beautiful, fragrant woman might inspire a male artist?

Let's look at this another way. Imagine another magazine ad, with a sexy man anointing himself with, oh, I don't know, say, Modern Macho Muse.  The copy says "Introducing Modern Macho Muse, Be an Inspiration". It's not going to fly. I'm a figurative painter, so is there a man out there trying to inspire women artists like me? Okay, let's not talk about me, let's say, women artists who are around 20 years old and look like supermodels? Maybe, but I think men are encouraged by society to be the creator, the mover and the shaker, the money-maker, not the muse.

Muses often don't end well, historically speaking. I think there are a few books about that subject out there. Of course, artists often don't end well, historically, either. Shhh! tell no one.

Of course, a woman can always just inspire herself. When I look around at the representational art world, more and more I'm seeing women artists using themselves as their own models and muses in their paintings. This saves a lot of money on model fees, for one thing. I also think it intrigues collectors, especially if the artist is attractive and intelligent. I think it is a terrific idea to do this, a talented woman artist should take control of her own image and explore the range of expression that she possesses.

It gets a little more complicated as the artist ages. Then you have something like this going on, in this self-portrait by Alice Neel:

"Self Portrait". Alice Neel, image from here.

I have some complicated feelings about the portrait above. It's a powerful painting, but as I said, I have complicated feelings about it.  I'll go into this and the subject of placing yourself in paintings in a later blogpost, I think.

Back to the perfume ad! What bothers me about this ad is that women in their fantasies are still being encouraged to be the passive thing that sits there looking pretty instead of the active, creative thing that paints her. Even worse, the marketing people at  The-Company-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named thinks this is "Modern". Surely we can do better than that.

"Stocks and Butter Knife"

"Stocks and Butter Knife", 20" Tondo

This painting reflects my interest in William Nicholson's still life paintings and compositions.  I wrote a post or two about him a while ago, see here.

I paint a lot of still lifes (still lives? does anybody out there know the correct plural of this?) and I've put many of them on circular panels. To my mind, this format implies either of two things: 1. spiritualism and the timeless, or time-based and circular, universe, or 2. intense concentration or focus, such as using binoculars.

I'm interested in using shadows as devices in composition as well as making a statement about form moving in and out of the light. All those edges in the painting are compositional devices as well.

Just looking at this painting brings back the memory of having all those stocks in the room while I was painting them and being close to them for a long time. Those are big heavy blooms on those stalks. (Actually, those are called "panicles". I can't believe I still remember that from Botany 101. I like knowing the names of things, I should warn you about this if this is the first time you're reading this blog.)

The panicles seem to keep growing with time as flowers open up and start to weigh down the top part of the stem. This causes the shadows to shift and if you're not quick about it, the whole mass shifts and you'll have to re-do the painting. One of these panicles grew out toward my direction and so I've painted it with more texture and opaque paint, one of the technical ways to show closer relative distance in traditional painting techniques. I'm not sure you can see this in the photo, though.

The closest item to the viewer is the butter knife and this is where I've reserved my thickest paint. I really liked putting it a little off the edge of the shelf here - it's an often-used device in representational painting to show space and distance in the painting plane.

Have you ever smelled stocks? They're sweet and powerful, one of those smells that you either love or you hate. Somebody brought me a bundle of them long ago when I was home trying to recuperate from a hospital stay. I was in bad shape and couldn't leave the room much so that smell really stays in my memory. But oddly, I don't associate the smell with any bad feelings, I associate the smell with being cared for and special. Smell is an odd sense, isn't it? Primitive, really, you can try to educate it and tell it to behave itself, but it's the mysterious wild child of your senses.

Studio Mannequins

Every so often when I'm online I see wonderful old art studio mannequins. Here are three from an internet website for antiques and collectibles, www.susanwalter.com:

I don't own these, but I have two serviceable ones - Nelson and Caspar. Nelson's primary charm is that I made him myself.

Nelson is splint into two entities, Full Nelson and Half Nelson. I just have Half  Nelson set up at the moment, but you'll get the drift here:

Half Nelson is a pair of long underwear bottoms stuffed with old T-shirts. He's further supported by dowels to help him sit up straighter. He's what I use when I want to paint clothing like skirts or pants from life and the model or client has left for the day. Full Nelson is more of the same, wherein I stuff the top part of the long underwear with rags and dowels, bending the elbows as need be.

The benefit of these mannequins is that they are cheap to make and if you have a sudden reversal of fortune, you'll have a bonanza of old t-shirts to pull out and wear. There are lots of internet sites that show you how to cut up and rip t-shirts so they look more fashionable, too, though I'm not sure I personally could pull this off with panache.

Here's Caspar, my other (somewhat) posable mannequin. When I bought her she was one of the few affordable ones I could find, but a quick Google search has revealed a lot more of them out there now, with heads and more realism. Still, she does the job and hangs from a metal loop to give her some extra height. A pity that she can't sit. Caspar is dressed for my latest large painting which is nearly done.