My Process for Realistic Painting

A few years ago I bought a nice French easel. It was even made in France. It came with its own backpack to carry it in because these are meant for painting on location outdoors. It has a drawer for supplies; you can strap a canvas to the outside of it and hike out to some nice vista just like Renoir or Degas back in the day. It’s great, and it’s still in mint condition.

You see, I live west of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon where it is probably raining right now, so I don’t really know why I bought that thing. I am a studio painter. You won’t see any landscapes from me. Still life is the way to go here. Plus, I have what is known as hyperfocus; I just love looking at the same thing day after day and meticulously rendering every detail.

My realistic work is always done from direct observation. I begin by setting up the little still life in my studio, where it will remain untouched, hopefully, and gets dusty until the painting is done. The perimeter around the staged scene is then posted with landmine warning signs that I ripped down from some landmine hazard area just up the road a minute. Just kidding. There are no landmines in my studio. The blast would disrupt the still life. And I don't post those signs. And there is no landmine area around here. And I did not steal the signs from a landmine riddled combat zone on the outskirts of Portland. But I do cover the windows. It’s so there is no light shifting around as the sun sails by; not because I have anything to hide in here or anything. I put one light on the still life model. Then I play around with everything until I find a composition that I like, paying attention to the shadows, reflected light, and how everything will fill out the canvas.

Next, I usually do a charcoal sketch in full scale on newsprint to match the size of the canvas I have in mind. This helps work out the composition and lets me see how it will work once it is turned into a two-dimensional situation.

Charcoal is wonderfully easy to wipe off or erase away and change. A chunk of it sideways can be used to fill in shaded or otherwise darker areas quickly. Charcoal is crude and blunt, but that is good for this because it prevents focusing on smaller details early on when you should only be concerned with the overall layout and working the entire surface over all at once. When the charcoal step is done, you have a perfect model to use to make sure all your proportions and measurements are spot on as you work the painting.

I prefer linen over canvas for realistic painting. Canvas is just a cotton textile not much different than denim. Linen however is made from the fibers of the flax plant, which pretty much just grows in Europe. The fibers are peeled off and they have to be tied end to end to make a long fiber. All this labor, importing, and smaller production mean its way more expensive. But it is stronger and the surface is a lot better looking. It's hard to describe, but all the little knots and short fibers cause linen to have a totally irregular weave that looks very handmade, especially compared to cotton canvas which is perfectly uniform. The irregular surface gives it a more organic texture that just makes realistic paintings seem more realistic up close. It's hard to explain, but very easy to see. Of course if the paint is going on real thick, like in some abstract paintings, this texture would not matter because it's all covered up.

With the price of linen being so high, and because I like to do things from scratch the hard way when it really counts, so that I know it's done right, I buy the raw linen and stretch it myself. Then I size it with PVA, which is synthetic rabbit glue. It's like a watery white Elmer's glue that soaks into the fibers of the linen or canvas and seals them to protect them from the oil in the oil paint.

The oil in oil paint is usually linseed oil which ironically comes from the seeds of the flax plant, the same plant that provides the fibers to make linen. But here's the funny part: Linseed oil will slowly rot linen if it soaks into the fibers. The sizing is to protect the flax fibers from the flax seed oil, even though they are parts of the very same stupid plant! You gotta protect the flax from the flax! Ha! I don't know, maybe that's no big deal; but I just think that's hilarious.

Anyway, after the sizing dries, I lather on the gesso, which is just white paint made with chalk or gypsum. It can be oil based or acrylic. It's like primer, the paint sticks to it really well, and it fills in the little gaps between the fibers of your chosen fabric. If you want a really smooth surface you can put on more coats. I usually do two or three coats for a medium texture. I like the linen texture, but fine details require a certain level of smoothness. Also, the white gesso makes paint colors brighter when using translucent pigments.

So now I actually get to paint. I generally start with a thinned down wash of dark paint mixed with mineral spirits to block in the dark areas. Thinned down paint dries rather quickly. The first layer of paint will usually have at least some spirits mixed in to keep it lean. With oil paint you have to paint "fat over lean" which means when you are painting over dried oil paint, your new paint has to have more oil in it than whatever you are painting over. Adding mineral spirits to paint right out of the tube effectively decreases the amount of oil in the mix.

Therefore, you want to add spirits to the first paint you put down. If you have too much oil in your paint early on, after a couple of layers it will be so saturated with oil that you will not be able to paint over it. It will just bead up like water on glass. It won’t stick or spread out like normal. You never know how many layers you might need to lay down, so I always keep things real lean at the start. Even when oil paint is dry to the touch, it will still absorb oil from whatever you paint over it unless it is saturated.

By the way, oil paint does not actually dry. It oxidizes. Oxygen bonds to the oil molecules causing them to form into a solid resin structure. The oxidation process goes on for many years. Anything you paint will probably still be "drying" until after you are dead. It's really interesting stuff. Water-based paints dry. The water evaporates out. This is why water based paint shrinks a lot more when it dries. With oil nothing is leaving the paint. It is wonderful stuff because you can put it down real thick and when it "dries" it keeps exactly the same texture and shape.

To be continued....