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Category: linen

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Changing my support

If you don’t like how you’re painting, knock the struts from under yourself and see what happens.
Damariscotta Lake overlook, watercolor on Yupo, by Carol L. Douglas
I’ve been mulling over the color-shift I see between my oil paintings and my watercolors. My pigments are essentially the same. (Here are my supply lists for watercolorand for oil painting.) But my oil paintings of the same scenes always seem cooler. Is that because I’m toning in red? Or is something else at play?
David Dewey suggested the problem was, in a sense, all in my head. I’m so rooted in oils, he thought, that I’m more observational, and feel less free to depart from reality. My watercolors are a lark to me, so I give myself permission to experiment.
Since then I’ve been trying to be less bound to observed color. It’s too soon to say what the outcome will be, but I did look at a small painting in my studio yesterday—one that I thought was garish and overshot when I did it earlier this month—and thought, “That’s really not half bad.” There’s a lesson there, and it’s to not be too quick to judge your own work.
Damariscotta Lake overlook, oil on canvas, by Carol L. Douglas
Perhaps the problem is also the substrate. After all, my excitement about watercolor exploded when I discovered Yupo.
Because my residency oils were quite large, they were done on stretched canvases. For work under 24X20, I like RayMar panels. They’re solid, stable, archival—and pricey for beginning students. For them, I suggest a decent panel over a cardboard or MDF backing. As they grow more confident, they can move to a better-quality panel.
In May, I bought a bunch of different boards by different makers to test. Then I got busy with my season and forgot them. RayMar’s medium landscape cotton panel is a toothy board even after heavy toning. That makes for great control, and it’s a high mark for competitors to match.
Linen’s advantages over canvas mainly show on stretcher frames. Linen is highly reactive to the moisture in sizing and primer, and it’s very strong for its weight. It dries tight and it stays taut. Nothing is more satisfying to paint on than hand-stretched Belgian linen.
But those qualities are irrelevant in a glued linen panel. There isn’t much sense in paying a premium for linen to be glued down.
Still I’d bought a few linen panels from different makers in my assortment. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked the surface: it’s less toothy, which made it fun to slosh the paint around.
The problem with less-expensive boards is always their backing (although the gesso can be pretty thin, too). MDF and cardboard are perfectly fine in smaller sizes or for student work. But they aren’t as rigid as wood. Cardboard, particularly, bows and curls with time.
Poppy’s handmade birch panel.
On Sunday, as we were setting up for our last, quick,painting, Poppy Balser handed me a panel she’d made herself. It was clear birch, finished with two coats of Golden GAC 400 and clear gesso. She’d left the board unsanded, which gave it a better tooth than the manufactured versions of the same thing. And it was uncradled, which made it frameable for plein airevents.
I made a poor painting on it, but that was my doing, not the board’s. It’s the best new product I’ve painted on all year—of course, because it’s the most work. Still, I plan to make a few and keep playing.
Note: I’ve decided to teach one more plein airsession in Rockport. No, I’m not nuts. If it’s miserable, we’ll meet in my studio. But the light has been so fantastic in midcoast Maine, we might as well do another session before winter closes in for real.
Yesterday in Rockport.
I’ll be teaching a six-week plein air class on Tuesday mornings from 10-1. It runs from November 13 to December 18.

When weather permits, we paint at fantastic locations around the Rockport-Rockland-Camden area; rain dates are in my studio at 394 Commercial Street. Watercolor, oils, pastels and acrylics; all levels of painters are encouraged to join us. The fee is $200.

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Monday Morning Art School: drawing draperies

Whether you want to make a drawing as detailed as Prud’hon’s or as simplified as Gauguin’s, the process is the same.

My precious linen drape.

If you’re lucky enough to own a worn mid-century linen tablecloth, don’t get rid of it. It can stand in as a drape under a still life, or as a sheet in a figure drawing. You can even iron it and put it over the deal table in your garret when company comes. If you don’t have one, you need a cotton sheet for today’s exercise. Throw it over something and let’s get going.

In the late eighteenth century, Neoclassicism brought drapery studies back to the forefront of art training. Their challenge and appeal were the same as in antiquity. Drapery plays peek-a-boo with the human form, exaggerating and pointing up the body’s activities. That artfulness is lost on modern viewers, and so is the skill of draping.
Same linen cloth, appearing as a sheet in The Laborer Resting, by Carol L. Douglas
Modern man wanders around in jeans and t-shirts. We don’t tend to draw people in them; most figure classes are done with nude models. We don’t learn much about rendering fabric, or about rendering people in clothes.
Free form curves are measured as straight line segments, as on the right, and then smoothed into their final shape.
We’ve talked about ellipses, but free-form curves appear often in the natural world, and especially in drapery. They’re wild and sinuous, and they can be very confusing. It helps to visualize them as straight-line segments that are joined up and smoothed, as in the above illustration. For a refresher on how to use your pencil to measure, click here.
This is done the same way; there are just more line segments.
In my first pass, I have drawn all the curves of the drapes as straight-line segments. Pay no attention to value at this point. As always, measurement comes first. The most complicated shapes and shadows are still just a collection of angles, proportions and alignments.
With practice, you’ll be able to measure the curves as you draw them. You’ll still be measuring; you’ll just be doing it automatically.
Place the shadows. You get white or dark and that’s it. No shades of grey.
In your second pass, define the large areas of shadow. There is no detailed modeling done in this step, just placement of the large shapes. (If you’re nearsighted, you can take off your glasses for this step.) Don’t use value steps as we did two weeks ago: you get white and dark, and that’s it. Don’t refine your shapes, either.
Now you can start focusing on the details.
In your third pass, you can begin to explore the subtlety of the shapes and the relative values of each fold. Erase if you want, be more careful with your linework. If you love detailed drawing, start big and revel in this phase; it’s fun. Because you set the value relationships up front, you can’t really go wrong focusing on the details.
Drapery study, 1813, Pierre Paul Prud’hon, black and white chalk with stumping on blue paper, some squaring in black chalk (courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Why do I never finish these Monday Morning Art School drawings to the level of Pierre Paul Prud’hon’s wonderful drapery study at the Met, above? That kind of high finish is actually the easiest part of drawing, requiring just loads of time (and interest) to finish. It’s not where most people need help. They need help knowing how to fit all the puzzle pieces together at the beginning.
Whether you want to make a drawing as detailed as Prud’hon’s or as simplified as Gauguin’s, the process is the same—start by figuring out the shapes, then work out the shadow structure and then—and only then—worry about detailed modeling and mark-making.