People, I tried to paint some figs last night and was ignominiously defeated. Here instead is a curiosity: the first still life I ever painted. It was at art school two years ago and used the traditional method of (laborious) sight-size drawing, then drawing transfer to canvas, then several layers of oil paint (waiting a week between each layer for it to touch-dry), then a final glaze layer for detail.
Before I ever tried painting, I thought this sort of finish/look/style in an oil painting must be the hardest to do. In fact, in my opinion, this type of "tight" painting is much easier than loose painting. I remember looking at loose, juicy, painterly alla prima stuff and liking it but thinking, Well, that must be quite easy, you just slosh the paint around and have fun with it... Ha! Little did I know how much more difficult a loose style is, where every brushstroke must be thoughtful and expressive and placed in just the right way, with just the right value and color on the first go and the painting manage to somehow work together as a whole even with differing thicknesses of paint.
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