Tips, Tricks & Trivia by "Trial & Error"
The following are my own personal choices of items and methods I use in my art. These will continually change as new products come out and as I learn other techniques from friends and workshops and most of all by trial and error. Sometimes what works one day will not automatically work the next.
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I also started a new one .... top left of a wooded street scene with two people walking in the distance on a foggy morning. The bottom left is a local scene here in Ajax just at Halls Road and Rossland Rd.
The painting on the right will be the woodlot behind the Ajax hospital when all the trilliums were out last spring.
My medium of choice has been Liquin by Winsor & Newton. This is a gel-like substance that will help thin the paint to a looser consistency for better flow.
You need to be careful with using too much as I find it will give you a very slick surface that is hard to correct.
Lately I have been using only mineral spirits as a medium for some small oil works and it helps it to dry much quicker and can give me a watercolour-like consistency for very fine detail work.
I buy Liquin in the large economy size and use old small plastic film containers to put a small amount of Liquin in so I can save some room and weight in my paint box. The clear/white containers are better than the opaque black ones as you can see how much is left without having to open it.
By error, I found a good way to save dollars on mineral spirits. I have three small plastic containers that I use. Because I purchase by the litre, it is not convenient to carry that much to the club or plein-air painting so the small containers are lightweight and take up less space. When the spirits have become so muddy with paint it was normally at that point that I would just fill another small container and off I would go, leaving the old muddy one to dispose of later.
I discovered that after a few days the old muddy container was now totally clear and the sediment settled to the bottom. If you just pour off the clear spirits and dispose of the sludge residue you can make your 1 litre bottle last indefinitly. I have three of these small plastic containers so I can keep pouring off into one of them for settling while using another one and having always one clean one.
My best studio water container. Just a snack container that was bought at Christmas time with a variety of nuts in it. But this gives me three separate water wells so I travel less to the sink.
After I wasted a lot of money on different acrylic palettes including the snap on lid one with the sponge bottom and special paper you have to soak, that after a while the sponge goes moldy and you have to replace...... This is the best, just save the styrofoam food containers and throw them away when you are finished. You can see that the little holder cups for medium also clip on the side. I keep using a few of them for the same painting til it's finished ie: one for browns and earth tones, one for sky colours, etc.
