Paint Drying

 "It's as exciting as watching paint dry."

That's an old joke and it relates to what I am going to talk about in this post. Paint drying.

One of the reasons I like to paint water is that it lends itself well to working wet-on-wet and alla prima is my preferred method of painting. Blocking in colors and blending the edges seems to work for creating that wet look.

In painting complicated water as in this piece I need to keep in mind how big a section I want to tackle. A consideration is how fast my paint is going to dry. I don't use a medium which means I am not extending nor shortening the paint's drying time. My paints are just ground pigment in linseed oil. You would think that would lead to consistent drying times. Far from it.

Generally my browns dry overnight and whites can take anywhere from one to one and a half weeks depending on the humidity and temperature. Granted my lighter passages might be thicker in places but that doesn't account for the disparate drying times.

So what about greens and blues? They are often in the middle for drying times but some blues dry much faster than some other blues. What about a mixture of several blues? Much of the time I don't know how fast it will dry. That leads me to think about working in sections - usually a section I can finish in a day or two so I can smoothly blend it. Sometimes I miscalculate how fast I can paint a section and there are some very late dinners as I keep working in to the night.

As I started on this section I began questioning whether I bit off a bit too much.

Detail before blending

 

 

Once blended I often tweak the colors and add new passages