Happy New Year! I hope you all had a wonderful and joyful holiday.
I’ve decided to try my hand at oil painting. Not to take the place of pastel painting but to shake things up a bit and see how it affects my current work. As a pastel artist, I’m finding that oils are challenging in that I have to mix oil paints to achieve the color I want. With pastels I just have to find a stick of color that matches what I’m looking for. Of course, that means having hundreds, if not thousands of pastels of varying colors and tints. There have been some colors that I’ve had difficulty achieving with pastels and I’m hoping this experience with oils will help me to understand color mixing better. The other factor I’m learning is how to use and care for a new set of tools—another learning curve. What can I say—I love a good challenge!
For the month of January, I’m going to post a painting a day for the Strada 31-Day Challenge. These will be small, quick studies of an hour or two. All the paintings need to be done from life, not photographs, and these can include still life, interiors, figures, and landscapes. I prefer landscapes but this will stretch me further to tackle still life and possibly figures.
This is the painting for Day 1 #stradaeasel
I painted looking out my studio window. It was chilly morning of 23 degrees outside and snowing.
