Category: Process

The things I absolutely cannot paint without.

This is a thorough list of the art supplies that I currently use for creating my paintings. None of the links are affiliate links, they are just places I buy my stuff from.

Let’s start with the paint

I paint with South African paint for economic and environmental reasons. After trying out what is available, I choose Zellen. In particular, Zelcol Artist’s Quality Oil Paint, made in the seaside town of Kleinmond, not that far from where I used to live in Stanford.

I choose a limited palette, to limit how much paint I need to carry around with me when plein air painting, to limit how much paint I need to buy, and because a limited palette just looks great. Colour harmony is a thing!

These are my chosen colours:

Titanium white (always the big tube)
Arylamide lemon (or Cadmium yellow lemon)
Cadmium yellow medium
Yellow ochre
Burnt sienna
Alizarin crimson
French ultramarine
Phthalo blue

Medium

My favourite oil painting medium hands down is Cold Wax Medium. Zellen makes a 500ml tin that lasts me a few months. Yes, I am a total Zellen fan-girl.

Brushes

I love a scratchy bristle brush, and don’t wash them too often 😳. I clean them after using by wiping the paint off and dipping in turpentine. Occasionally, I use a boerseep (Afrikaans for “farmer’s soap”), or actual brush soap, and give them a good clean.

My favourites are Dynasty synthetic bristle brushes and have a collection of flats, brights, filberts and rounds.

I wrap them up in a Prime Art brush roll.

I buy them from Brush and Canvas. They were my local art shop when I lived in Cape Town and Hermanus, and they deliver for free for orders over R700.

Painting surface

I prefer to paint on HDF or MDF board.

I buy my board from a hardware shop and get them to cut it up into the sizes that I want to paint on. I lightly sand the boards and apply three coats of gesso to it, sanding again in between coats.

The gesso I use is, you guessed it, Zellen gesso.

Palette knives

Cheap and cheerful Prime Art 1010 palette knives are my go to.

Easel

I have a modern French box easel with aluminium legs to make it lighter to carry. I can fit all my paint, brushes, palette knives, little containers for turps, and a board clamps to the outside. I still need to take along another bag for my sealed brush washer and Cold Wax Medium, they don’t quite fit in the box.

If you’d like to see what my old plein air set up looked like, before I bought the French easel, watch this old video.

I was really itching to start painting when I started this one. It a very hot day during our second week in Adendorp. There were cicadas in the trees, Tom & Fred (the pets) were lounging in the shade. I put on a big sun hat and headed off left out of the gate.

A short way down the road I saw the painting. The sun shimmered on the dusty tar road ahead. Lovely shade from a thorn tree splattered across the road.

I took this photograph for reference and retreated back to the shade of the house to sketch it out.

Sketched out and blocked in. By this stage I was intrigued with the way the cold wax medium was behaving. The hot temperatures make it a little more liquid. There are definitely possibilities to be explored there.

Adjusting the distant and lighter foliage with lighter greens.

Reinforcing the darks and working on the edges within the painting.

Here I am with my nearly finished painting, standing in the view that I am painting.

And this is the final painting, available from MY SHOP with free shipping within South Africa.

I’m enjoying exploring the neighbourhood in our new village. Visually it is very different from the lush greens of Stanford in the Western Cape. On sunny days (most days around here) the colours are quite washed out and the light/dark contrast is heightened.

I’ve been collecting reference photographs everywhere I go, and making notes about good plein air painting locations.

Leeb Street, Adendorp

Oil on board
24 x 24 cm
Unframed

R2,600.00

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Value studies are the key to successful representational painting.

Value is how light or how dark something is. Establish the value relationships between the shapes in your composition. This gives you a very good chance of creating something that the viewer can recognise for what it is.

Getting the values right gives you a convincing painting. Value is much more important than colour to create something convincing.

I do my value sketches with a 4B pencil in a sketchbook.

Sometimes, once I’ve finished the value sketch, I decide that I’m not convinced by the composition. A different approach to the subject may make a better painting.

Value studies help me decide whether or not a painting will be visually appealing.

It’s also a practice run, and a chance to map out the big shapes for a quicker start to painting. For complicated subjects, I make two or three value studies. This helps me really get a feel for the shapes and their placement in the picture plane.

My step-by-step value study process.

1. Crop my photographic reference to the composition that I like.
2. Use this as reference to plot the parameters of the sketch.
3. Sketch out the big shapes from life, referring back to the reference photo to check that I’m within my parameters.
4. From life, start adding medium and smaller shapes within the big shapes.
5. Using three values: (light, mid, dark) I fill in the shapes.
6. I do this in graphite, a 4B or 6B pencil preferably.

A few value study examples

Click here to see more value studies in my sketchbook.

If you enjoyed reading about this part of my process, you’ll enjoy these posts too:

Where I find inspiration for my paintings
Process photographs of Leeb Street, Adendorp

See the paintings I create from some of these value studies.

This is the whole process of creating this oil original painting, from plein air pencil sketch to final studio painting.

My inspiration:

I was surprised by this painting. I wasn’t expecting much when I drove down to the river on a windy evening in March to find something to sketch from the car. As I sat there looking at the view, the clouds moved and a scene was lit up before me. Pinks and greens showed each other off in the evening light.

I only had a pencil and sketchbook with me that evening, but the moment of colour across the river had sparked an idea.

Once I began sketching the scene, it struck me that there was more to it than just the interesting colour that had flashed at me. The composition  was turning out to be something quite interesting too.

Unusual for a landscape but it made sense because it gave the feeling of how high the mountain is compared to the houses down below.

As I was sketching that evening I was already planning to be there again the next evening with paint.

My process:

I began with a quick 4B pencil sketch to gauge the values of the composition, and work out the placement of the houses in the foreground.

Looking at the sketch afterwards, I loved the organic shapes of the darker value on the mountain, and the feeling of height that they alluded to.

I also liked the juxtaposition of the straight roof lines of the buildings in the foreground and the edges of the yellow field against those interesting shadow shapes higher up.

I decided to go back to the same spot for a colour study that made up my mind immediately to do a bigger studio painting of this composition. I already liked the composition, so when I saw the conversation between the pinks and the greens, I was convinced.

Once I had sketched out the composition in burnt sienna, I blocked in the big shapes with thin colour.

I added more paint, refining values and the smaller shapes.

Final details in thicker paint.

Materials used for this oil original painting:

Zelcol oil paint in my usual limited palette:
titanium white, arylamide lemon yellow, yellow ochre, alizarin crimson, burnt sienna, ultramarine blue

A selection of hog hair brushes and one synthetic KUM Blackline no.4 for detail.

I repainted over an old acrylic painting on an ETH Canvas.

Artwork dimensions: 45 x 30 cm

Oil original painting on stretched canvas

Click here for all available oil original paintings

© Tracy Algar, Kleinrivier #1. Oil on canvas, 30 x 30 cm.

My favourite view of the Kleinrivier

I live closer to the river now than I did before. The quickest, easiest place to get to to sketch and paint river views is at the bottom of King Street.

What I love about this spot (apart from it being 5 minutes walk from home), is that it is on a bend in the river, giving jaw-dropping views in both directions.

One of those views is this one. In the early morning, the rising sunlight rakes across the landscape casting long tree shadows on the grassy banks of the Klein River.

Lately I’ve been spending more and more time on the bench near this spot (when there’s a bit of shade) that points me the other way down the river. I haven’t painted the downriver scene before, but I’ve been doing a few pencil sketches in my sketchbook, exploring various compositions and deciding on what time of the day I want to paint down there.

I’m looking for a time of day when the light makes the view more interesting. After a few sketches, I’m liking the evening, sunset sky with brilliant reflections on the water best.

Next post I’ll share will be my sketchbook pages of the past week at this spot.

Exploring a Stanford village view

This Stanford village view is a bit different, not featuring the mountains, but a delightful view all the same.

There’s a cut through from one road to another, between Mariana’s house and the space where cars park when their passengers are taking a cruise on the African Queen.

It’s almost always a bit soggy here, and often, there is water lying in the tracks making pretty reflections. 

© Tracy Algar, Wandelpad 2. Oil on canvas, 30 x 20 cm.

Wandelpad #2 is a plein air painting that I painted on the Stanford Wandelpad in spring last year

I’d been anticipating this painting outing for a while. I’d scouted the location, checked the weather forecast daily, and waited patiently for the portable palette box I was having made to be ready for me to pick up.

Finally all pieces were in place and the morning light beckoned me up the hill to this scene. I set up in the shadow of the tree to be able to see my canvas in the bright light.

As is usual in a village like Stanford, a number of familiar folks stopped to chat on their morning walks, and see what I was doing. I am so glad I have stopped caring about people watching me paint. Or have I?

The hardest part of painting en plein air (outdoors), is deciding on where those shadows and highlights are going to go while the landscape changes by the minute. I take a photograph as soon as I’ve made up my mind to ensure I have a reference, especially if I end up finishing the piece back at the studio.

This piece is part of my Stanford series, exploring the landscapes of the village and surrounds with a particular focus on shadows and light.

About this painting

Oil on stretched canvas
20 x 30 cm

This painting is available from Journey in Stanford. If you’re not in Stanford, you can view it online here.

At the time I started painting this little Stanford landscape, I was walking this path daily. It’s a few month’s later as I post this here, and my Wandelpad walks have slacked off a bit. The past few months have been a time of tumultuous change, something I apparently specialise in! Needless to say, I’ve stomped, skipped and ambled this path hundreds of times as I’ve processed what the past month’s have presented. The Wandelpad has many faces. I love this particular face.

I finished this painting a few days ago in/on my new stoep-studio. It’s about time. Things are settling down a bit for me, there’s a workshop on the near horizon at last, and I hope to spend many more hours on the Wandelpad this summer, painting the always inspiring Stanford landscape.

A shining triangle of green peeks through a dark tangle of vegetation as you approach down the path. As you get closer, you see that it is the grass on the other side of a green archway over the path.

 

To view in person, please visit Journey at 13 Queen Victoria Street, Stanford.

To view it online, click the button.