Journal of My Oil Painting Techniques

I wasn’t sure whether to post about this still life oil painting techniques today or not because it seems like I made it worse by working more on it. But I decided to just write about everything that I go through without hiding anything because I also want to document the mistakes and learn from it. Maybe it would help some readers as well in learning what not to do.

I actually don’t quite know what I did wrong or what I have to do to fix the problem, but just stuck. I feel as if I am overworking it without improving the piece at all. It is pretty discouraging and I am deciding whether to continue with it tomorrow or just quit because it is just not fun when the painting doesn’t go anywhere even though you are working so hard on it.

Today I worked a lot more on the background, blending and smoothing out the colors and refining the edges. Then I worked some more on both the paint tube and the brush, trying to tighten up and add more details.

I do like how the color is going with this still life painting, but I think the problem is in the drawing. I am trying to get it spot on accurate to what is in front of me and I am having a very hard time with it.

I had a hard time seeing the length of the paint tube, as I could not determine accurately where it ends. I wasted a good amount of time altering the length of the tube.

The texture of the paint is building up rather unpleasantly, giving undesirable roughness to areas where it should be smooth, etc. I’m not sure whether I should use the sandpaper to smooth it down or not.

I actually didn’t notice how bad the painting looked until I took the photo of it with my digital camera and saw it on the computer monitor after it was uploaded. It definitely lost the freshness for sure.

I may need to clean my palette as well because it is very unkempt and I wasn’t very organized with the color mixing process.

I think I will try the sight size oil painting techniques after this piece just to see how much easier it gets. I don’t think it would improve my eye’s accuracy though. I have seen too many sight size artists draw very badly as soon as the sight size setting is taken away from them. All the strict settings, and the measuring tools seems too tedious to me as well, which is why I still havn’t tried it.

John Singer Sargent’s oil painting techniques were usually the direct approach or the Alla-Prima method, and even though he did not do much still life paintings, there are a lot of still lifes as background elements in his portrait paintings. A lot of times they are treated with minor brushstrokes or very simplified indications that looks like nothing but just daubs of paints close up, but as you step back nothing would look more realistic, as those paint daubs start to blend together filling in all the blanks.

I am not exactly sure what Sargent’s oil painting techniques were. I have seen photographs of him holding a pencil or a brush in front of him with one eye closed, which indicated he did indeed measure sometimes. I also read somewhere that he encouraged the use of the plumb lines, a tool used for measuring the verticals.

But I am pretty sure he did not use the sight size method, although he may have used it at some point during his learnings. In any case, his paintings show the most accurate and masterful draftsmanship I have ever witnessed

I am going to give sight size a try soon and keep experimenting with other oil painting techniques as well.