journals for 2005

Example #1

Example #2

Example #3

..maybe coming soon

Journals - Painting
For: Professor Bruce Allen

Painting is crazy. I would never have guessed how much pre-painting work there actually is. In fact that is what the entire first week was dedicated to doing, just getting ready to paint. We had to cut all of our boards; I don’t know if it was all of our boards because it seems like we are going to need some more, but it still was a lot of work. We had to take all of these boards and then we had to sand them down with the coarse sand paper. After that we took the fine sand paper and sanded it down some more. Then once that was done the same process had to be repeated to sand down and round off the edges and corners that they would not interfere with the painting process. I believe this is done so that the paint does not hook onto and clump up at the edges when you are painting. Once that was done we had to take at least one of our boards and glue it on both sides, then it would dry and had to be sanded down with steel wool. This was done once more and now the board is ready for the gesso, which we have not gotten to yet. But this clearly shows that there is a lot of work that goes into painting before one can even begin to paint. It is quite the experience; I enjoyed it quite a bit too. There is a Zen like effect that all the sanding and gluing has on me; it was enjoyable.

Though we have not gotten to the painting portion of the class yet, we did learn a good bit about our media and some different terms and things to know before we can paint. First off, during the semester we are going to be painting with four different types of media: egg tempra (both transparent and opaque), oil, acrylic, and encaustic.

The egg tempra is mostly done for fine detail and uses a watercolor brush. With transparent egg tempra, there is no white paint; the white comes from the background. In opaque egg tempra, you mix white paint with the colors for lighter or white paint. The colors in egg are a dry pigment and have to be mixed.

The oil uses bristle brushes and palette knives to apply the paint. The colors for oil paint are already pre-mixed and do not have to be made like with egg tempra.

Acrylic uses nylon or artificial material for its brushes. Like the oil paint, the colors come pre-mixed. Acrylic paints dry faster than the other media and as they dry they change to a darker color. Also acrylic paints can be painted on anything, and I think that is awesome.

Encaustic also uses bristle brushes and palette knives for applying it. Unlike the other media though, encaustic is a wax and not really a paint. It is supposed to have a translucent quality, which I have not really gotten a chance to see much of yet.