Oil Lesson 5: Using a Painting knife

I thought it might be a tad boring but it wasnt , not the least bit~

As a matter of fact I did enjoy the lesson thoroughly today….it reminded me of doing the sugar icing for cakes ;)

And well, I am no baker….in fact I suck big time at anything to do with cooking so it was daunting to try to use the painting knives at first.

Definitely the first stroke was the toughest.

Ms Shia showed me how to practise on my palette, after which yea, I did loosen up and soon was gleefully plying the paints liberally.

As usual, one starts with the darkest shades and Ms Shia said it was important to paint the eyes so as to get a firm anchor for the other locations…she was as usual right, of course! As soon as the eyes and nose, ears were in place, the rest came easy enough.

Luckily I had bought so many different types of painting knives….

Applying the paint thickly requires a large or medium trowel shaped knife; to get the illusion of fur, I found it best to use the small paddle shaped knife and for the outline of eyes, I prefer to use a small diamond shape knife but here I must admit that alas for Tobie's beautiful pupil, I had to cheat by using a brush !

At first my Tobie looked like a street cat until Ms Shia told me to fatten her up by making the head rounder and the eyes much much bigger. Wow, it works.

The magic touch was the whiskers….it pays to ensure that the paint beneath the whiskers are of darker shade and also not flowing in the same direction as the whiskers…such simple adjustments and I have my beautiful Tobie looking right back at me from my round canvas….

Mmmm, cant wait to finish the other two canvasses of Roxy and Tiger when I come back from diving the Maldives ~

P/S:

Some of you may have been wondering whether water mixable oils are of any good….Well, for this painting I prepared the background 3 days ago with a combo of sap green and viridian hue from Reeves water mixable oil colors (box set of 12 tubes x 1.2ml for only RM $22.50 , just about USD7….what a bargain).

I know that I will use it often for backgrounds because it has proven to be very economical as well as efficient , looks good and dries super fast…