Back to the Buddha keepsake today for another oil painting.
Back to the Buddha. After going to Blick art supply today and getting some Winsor and Newton Monarch brushes plus some other supplies that would complete my ultimate setup I decided to paint the Buddha candle holder again.
I love the new brushes, I’m pretty sure that the synthetic Monarch brushes will be my choice of brush from now on. I even purchased a student grade synthetic brush to do some tests with and see how it handled. It was no contest for the Monarch brush. These brushes have great spring with minimal texture on the canvas they hold paint well and they are supper smooth to paint with. Also I painting on an 8×10 canvas board this time. I wanted to get the setup similar to what I would use if I was making a serious painting. I loved painting in the canvas texture. I will say that I have all these foam core pieces that I’m still painting on because they were left over from a failed world map painting and of course these are sub par to anything. So I will have to do some testing with gesso boards, and stretched canvas to see what I prefer exactly.
Previously, years ago when I was painting like crazy, I thought it really didn’t matter that much about the materials. Even now skill is paramount and I’m sure John Singer Sargent could paint circles around me even with crayons and tree bark but the better materials here really help a ton. Below is the list of materials that I think is my perfect setup for now.
I must also point out that I have to add medium to all my paints, I’m using Winton painting just because I have a ton of them and I don’t want to waste them. But in order to use these awesome brushes I have to improve the flow of the paints with medium. I will include the paints that I will be purchasing once all my Winton have run out… that is going to take a while.
I used all the drawing steps similar to last painting and they were very helpful. I’m not very confident of the angle o this photo graph, I know my drawing is off, but I think its a bit closer then what is show. I also took a pic of the painting in process. The drawing was a bit off here and I fix a bit of it before the end.
Pretty happy with the values here, the far right of the right leg could be much darker and there are a lot of subtle tones that are missed but overall I’m happy.
I was painting the cast shadow in the background and hatted that the edges of the brush strokes were too soft. So I took out my Langnickel brush and knocked it back with some feathering, it really made a good difference.
I kept the composition simple and didn’t focus on it at all. The only thing I wanted to do was keep the entire figure in the painting.
Not much of a focus on color here. I just recognized which areas were warm and which were cool and tried to keep them somewhat true.
