What I am learning

As I am picking back up plein air painting in oil, I am looking at paintings I admire and watch how the artists paint them.
In particular Marc Dalessio's work speak the most to me. He paints many ordinary scenes, but turn them into little jewels. In his paintings I can see the strong sense of design, great drawing skills, great control of the brushes, and most importantly a passion for capturing the scenes. His work ethic is also an inspiration to me.
To me it's very important to study paintings that inspire me. There's no point to look at paintings that I do not enjoy, because I don't feel the drive to dissect and learn from them. In Marc's paintings, I can look at how he simplifies shapes almost to the extreme, breaking complex foliage into flat shapes based on values. As long as the composition is sound, and the values are precise, they look spectacular.
When I go out to paint, I like to think about what I have learned, and try to apply them. Sometimes it just doesn't work, either it's because I don't really understand the method, or it's because it just doesn't work with how I work.  But when it works, it's so rewarding.

Some things I have learned recently that I find absolutely works with me:

1) Sight sizing:
I have never been taught this before. Marc's youtube tutorial on that is great. whenever I painted before, I always found it a chore to bring out my viewfinder, tighten it to the view I want to frame, and hold it there as I marked down the boundaries to the painting surface. Once I have the boundaries landmarks I could work my way in to fill out the rest of the drawing. With sight-sizing, it's much easier. I set up my pochade box so it's the height of the subject (so far it's always slightly higher than my eye level), and just dart my eyes left and right to practically duplicate what I see onto the canvas. Of course I still have to mark down some lines to secure the compostion, but it helps so much. It also helps getting colours and values right easier, because darting my eyes left and right I can compare 2 images (the view and the canvas) more easily.
I find though, painting when the painting support is higher than eye level, my arm gets really sore lifting after a while, not sure how to fix that.


2) Work slow:
I always had the idea that to have an expressive painting one needs to painting expressively and fast. Over the years, I watched some good artists painting including recently Marc's demo in Switzerland. He works so slow and careful! He works over the surface gently and get the edges sharp meticulously and they still look expressive at the end. In my early painting years I thought my paintings looked alive and passionate, but honestly looking back, some were very sloppy and messy. I believe now to make a good painting one needs to think while he paints too, it's an intellectual process. Painting slowly, I can have time to make sure my colours/values are more correct; I can make sure I have covered all the thin transparent area because I start adding opaque colours on top; I give myself more time to revise my drawing and shapes as I go.


3) Steady hands:
This kind of goes hand in hand with point 2. I have never bothered with a Mahl stick, but now I would really like to have one. It doesn't mean that to work slow and steady you will end up with a stiff painting. To be steady you will get more precise lines work and more perfect small shapes. One thing about working en plein air on small scale is that, it's hard to make the painting look grande compared to a studio painting, because the lack of smaller finer details. So if you don't have small shapes to show scale in the plein air painting, it can look crude and amateurish.


4) Key the sky first:
Again, another one of Marc's approaches. I have been trying it out for the last 2 weeks and I want to keep doing it for now.


5) Use less paint:
This doesn't apply to everyone, but it works for me.
Thinning paint to me always meant adding turpentine, but now I have a new understanding.
Basically, you don't need a lot of paint to cover the surface, especially if it's not the top layers. If the paint is thick, where it touches the support is gripped/absorbed by it, and the excess at the top is loose. When you apply another layer of paint on it, the 2 layers of paint mix and you have smears. Even to thin with turps, you want to make sure your brush is not loaded with paint for the bottom layers.
For the top level, you apply the fat over lean rule. Fat doesn't necessarily mean more paint, it can be fattened with medium (linseed oil for example). For the bottom layers you either use little paint, or dilute with turpentine to thin it, or together.


6) Don't use largest brush possible:
This is what I heard before: "Use the largest brush possible." I find it doesn't work for me. I find to use a brushes a bit smaller than the shapes I want to make give me good results. If it's too big, it's harder to control and it can end up looking crude and boring. I like my paintings to look elegant and with variation in every area. With smaller brush I can achieve that.