It is quite funny how your mind sometimes plays tricks on you. How about your memories?
For the longest time I was convinced that watercolors were my first love with regards to art media. Probably, because I have proof. The other day I rummaged through my collection of loose ‘artworks’ that I have collected in a big folio over the years.
And I mean ‘over the years’ quite literally as some of the paintings date back to my high school days, which takes us back to the early 80s. The paintings brought back a lot of memories, family vacations in Denmark, fan art for my favorite British punk rock band, sketches of live nude models, THE colors of the time: Black, red, gray and white - lol. Most of it was in watercolors and graphite pencil.
Then, just today I realized that along with the watercolors my dad, brother and I often had weekend sessions of oil painting. Quite vividly I remember that we had a caravan parked in the garden over winter and we’d use it as our painting studio, keeping the poignant smell of the paint out of the house.
There was only the three of us and I loved it. We were painting, sipping tea and bantered along while painting. You have to know, my dad loved twisting words. It was fun times. And when we were done for the day, we would cover the unfinished oil paintings with damp cloth to keep the paint from drying and we’d be ready to go the next weekend.
Despite the fun I had, for some reason I didn’t remember the oil paint that fondly. Maybe it was overshadowed by the time spent with my dad and brother? I don’t know.
Many years later - welcome to the digital era - in 2015 I got the first iPad Pro and along with it Procreate App for digital paintings. I use both all the time for sketching, illustrations, inking and painting. Yet until today I never tried the oil paint brushes.
Now I did and I can’t seem to stop. There is something about the wet mixing of paint and colors directly on the canvas that I had almost forgotten. It is very different from working with watercolors. You move a little here, push the paint a little there and all of a sudden you have a completely different look and feel.
Don’t like it? Mix in more paint or a different color or tone and see what happens. Some might now think ‘yeah, digital art, just hit undo and start over’, but it’s not that. Yes, of course you could do that, but with oil paint, just like in traditional oil painting, you really don’t have to. You simply paint over, mix in, push or pull. It honestly feels pretty realistic to me.
Here is my very first digital oil painting after decades of not touching this particular medium. Actually, I started the painting with a generic brush and you can see pretty clearly in the timelapse when I changed to the oil paint brush. This is not a finished painting and it may not be beautiful, but I started it to try this ‘new’ medium and thus stayed with a very limited color palette, too. I’ll include a couple of close ups for you to better see the brush strokes.
Now I’m excited to start a new oil painting. How about you? Have you rediscovered a long forgotten something? Has your mind, memory played tricks with you?
