Aug 8th: More Misadventures in Oil Paint

I woke up this morning and thought:  Now that's one ugly background.  Which, it was.  So... I worked on this stupid background pretty much all afternoon.

Firstly, I realized that more paint and less paint thinner the better.  Since oil paints take FOREVER to dry, when you try to use a brush that has too much thinner on it, you end up thinning out the paint that's already on the canvas.  Ugh.  I also realized that my brushes, while beautiful and professional, are just way too small to tackle something like a large background.  But, nothing could be done about my brush size for the time being.  So, I used a technique where I load up my brush and just blob it on the canvas bit by bit and blend it after.  This, strangely, worked.

There's what it looked like before blending.  It looks awful and horrid.  But... after you blend...

Layering seemed to be working.  I like where the background is going and the color choice but in the end, I found that the looseness of the canvas is messing with my work and looks bad.  The paint keeps getting caught up in the creases.  I also think that the background color for this particular painting needs to be lighter.  My grandpa's uniform is just too dark of a color to stand out on such a dark military green background.  For now, I'm keeping this canvas and background for a future project I have in mind.  I'm going to take it in to get re-stretched.  Tomorrow, I'm going to buy a new canvas.

I don't consider this scrapping to be a complete loss.  Through trial and error I learned more about how oil paints behave.  I've also picked up several books from the library to see if they offer anything that might help my technique when I start over.