Tag: Painting

Getting Ready: Oil Painting &Abstract Term

Behind the Scenes

I was nursing that awful cough & sore throat that everyone in London has. It meant that I didn’t make anything this week. Instead, all I could do was lift a finger to order the oil colours that my new art teacher suggested the class buy.

Managed to get my order of oil paint medium


I was so sick that I wasn’t in the mood for painting in the class this week, but because it was an online course (oil painting), I could log in and meet my other classmates, see the setup and observe. They seem like a nice bunch from around the world including the USA. I like how the teacher wants us to show our painting on screen so that she gets the effect of looking over our shoulders. I find it fascinating what teachers can do in the online learning space.

Being a mutted observer for my online oil painting lesson.


I was so sick this week I completely forgot about the Friday evening class in abstract painting. However, I am on the mend and feeling less under the weather.

Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash


Next week I hope to join my art classes and show you more of what I’m doing.

Photo by Behnam Norouzi on Unsplash

Character as the X factor in portrait paintings

Personal Reflections

Less beautiful people make the best models. This week I discovered how people with more character in their faces contribute to making the most interesting paintings.

This picture is about a life model who had a very amazing head shape. In this painting, I am halfway through and hope to have finished it next Sunday.

I still have fine hair details to include and I must get the interesting skin tones and textures sorted.

Only time will tell whether I manage to do justice to this man’s interesting face. Whatever the outcome I shall post my result in a future post.

Initial Ideas: One

Behind the Scenes

I’m creating a collection of small finely painted works that contain expressions of the alphabet.

Here are the first 10. Further blogs will have letters J through to Z.

These delightful small oblong paintings with initials might make lovely gifts for those wanting monograms in art. Or these are great for people WFH and they want their initials for their surname displayed on their bookshelf.

Well-manicured: Perfecting my brush strokes

Behind the Scenes

In an earlier blog, I complained about how I wasn’t happy with the brush strokes on the green sauce boat. https://wordpress.com/post/homeofficecharm.com/2811

Since then I spent some time practising what I said I would do and remembered that inner manicurist in me. Thus I imagined that I was painting a very fussy client’s fingernails. That seems to do the trick because keeping the medium and paints nice and light and thin and applying several thin layers help me to create a lovely glossy transparent look. It appeared to be like the glossy effect of the original sauceboat

Getting gloss medium layers right

Top tip: I might inspect more paintings for the brushstroke work. It never occurred to me how much time and effort should go into getting the painted effect I want right. And thanks to my old career in beauty therapy and those manicures, french polishes I did I can gain confidence in my painting brush stroke techniques.

Colour scales & tone

Art & Illustration

I got painting in colour this week. The still life got me to experiment with light and shadows.

She said it is a lovely little painting 🖌️Acrylic still life on paper on warm peach ground

I did the shadows and dark s without using pure black on the page but instead using primary colours to create a neutral. That dark neutral would also create a lovely grey when white was added to it.

Doing my colour wheel 🎡 meant I squeezed in two extra colours to make 14 instead of 12. My orange colour scales show the journey to dark neutral turning into grey.
Developing my colour scales practice