This morning I woke up at stupid o'clock to get down to the boathouse and knock out a little painting before it was time to open.
I had leftover paint from yesterday I wanted to use.
The sky had that morning fog-mist-haze effect happening which was pretty cool. The NJ buildings were lighter than the sky which I thought looked great.
6x8 oil
In my egg tempera class we learned about priming with traditional gesso-- the old style ground used for oil paint and egg tempera. It 's ancient. I have known about it but never used it and always thought it was too complicated. It isn't.
Traditional gesso is just marble dust and rabbit skin glue, which is not actually made out of rabbits. Maybe it was, once, but isn't now. It's a high- quality fancy gelatin that comes in powder/granules. You heat it on low heat and seal & prime your panels.
It's basically marble dust Jell-O.
It's definitely weirder and more involved than acrylic priming- or oil priming- but the surface is SO nice! It's completely non-toxic and will re-wet with water. It is always water-soluble, so you can prime your panels and wet-sand them much later.
So yeah there's more prep work involved, but do a whole bunch of panels at a time and it's not a big deal.
The surface is REALLY absorbent- which I knew but getting the actual feel of it is another thing entirely. It's something I want to experiment more with this summer; layers tack up very quickly and this has interesting possibilities.
I do think I need to use a medium tho, which makes sense.
Back in the day before paint tubes were invented, artists mixed their oil paint just like we do for egg tempera. Except with oil, not egg yolk. So the paint was oilier, which would work well on a very absorbent surface.
Anyhow, I need to play around with it.
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It was nice to be on the water.
