two new step by steps

It's time for a personal challenge. I'm going to post two paintings that I am starting and post the progress steps on them here. The first one is a landscape from a local botanical gardens. This one will be done like the last two landscapes in oils on canvas. The still life of cherries in a silver pitcher is on masonite with an extremely smooth finish. I haven't tried oils on masonite yet, and it is very different so far! Its like trying to paint with mayonnaise on a chalk board. It will be hard to blend wet on wet on this surface, so I will have to lay the paint on side by side and do soft brush blending, working with out medium and keeping things on the dry side. I'll have to let it sit between sessions and dry out, too. The smooth surface makes the paint 'lift' if you repeatedly stroke the brush, so it will be interesting to see how I like this support for the oil medium. Piece of cake with acrylics, but totally different with oils. The idea is to have very little surface texture to deal with.