Also under construction (in other words, I'm too lazy to work on the text again, so just have some fun with the Germanisms and typos)
This page attempts to answer the following question:
How to paint a big old picture (big is if you can't get it out of the house) without shelling out big time?
Answer: Avoid art supply stores. Go to your local lumber place instead, and/or to Home Depot. For the canvas, buy a dropcloth, for the back frame buy cheapo strapping and some steel angles to make it sturdy. Instead of the expensive gesso, try some straight forward contractor's paint with a bit of Paris Plaster powder to make it thick. Formost, look for nice colors in nature and grab some stones, sand and soil. Make illegal stops on the Massachusetts Turnpike and pick up some really nice pigments. To get those, pound the stones down with a hammer and grind them with mortar and pestel . (I didn't apply all these rules and it cost me more like 160 bucks total).
Let's see what we got for the sceene below: The white is mostly a hand full of ground lime (went to the garden section of Home Depot, found one of the numerous bags that got forked badly by the fork lifter and filled a brownbag with the white stuff: enough for five master pieces). I ground up some shells as well, for the blue of the sky, but I had to cheat with a little bit of coelian blue from my watercolors. The ochres are mainly soils, such as from a digout by an excavator near Amherst. Black, that's easy: Charcoal. The problem is that the compressed coal used for grills has a funny smell of some waxes that are used to glue them together - that might cause later some problems for art restorators (you wish, Reiner - won't be a problem for the garbage processing plant). Gray: no problem - take some ashes or any old boring stone. Of course, no gray is like the others. It's fascinating how trivial the result of grinding up fancy stones can be and how georgeous are the powders of really boring stones that can be picked up almost anywhere.
|
Apple tree near Bay Road. (73x54inches). Materials: Stone, ashes, sand, grill coal bricks, Gesso, Hard&Brite Floor Finish, deep acrylic tint base. As shown here, the painting isn't quite ready yet but is coming along well. |
Some of the ground up "pigments". I use also a fine sieve to seperate the powder from the bigger lumps. |
In order to paint we need a medium that keeps the pigments down on the canvas. I started with a little bottle of matte medium (expensive!) which was empty after painting about one coat of the grass. So I switched to contractor's deep tint acrylic base - 10 times the amount for the same price. One has to make sure that the acrylic tint doesn't contain any (white) pigments. Otherwise, that pigment is going to just paint in white all your big lumpy "pigment" rocks (the things you thought you turned into dust while sweating to grind them up) . Finally, I didn't like the extreme pasty behavior of the deep tint and switched to a product even less expensive: ACE Hardware's Hard&Brite Floor Finish (under Janitorial Maintainance Products). It's as it says: High gloss, scuff resistant, labor saving and, by golly, fast-drying. And it doesn't even smell much and is considered non-hazardous. The result is a painting that one could walk on !?. Oh well....
Final Stage of the picture
|
|
Here is an attempt to make things look a bit more wintry. The only media "allowed" to make white snow was white sand and lime. However, they do not cover very well, which is a limitation unless one wants to create a really heavy crusty monstrum. There is already a fairly thick layer on the picture (about 2-3mm thick) and it really feels and looks like colorful sandpaper. I decided that this is going to be the final state of this picture after trying to paint, through and blow more lime on it without significan improvement of the brightness. Real pigments would come in handy here but it would be more cheating. |
Here are some details of the painting. (Click to see full size): It's sand, and the close up looks more like a mural on concrete.
|
The little house near Bay Road |
The snow on the main tree |
You try to write your signature in rust dust... |
