So this was my first ever attempt at painting on Arches Oil Paper. It was during my first oil and cold wax workshop and I was attempting to follow what I had been successfully doing on the wood panels with the wax, but the paper doesn’t take the oil paint in the same way that the boards do. The paint almost absorbs into the paper so I had a really hard time getting the same awesome textures I was getting on the wood. I ended up giving up on the paper and setting it to the side for a long while, possibly a year or so, before I picked it up again.
Unfortunately I don’t have any photos of the phases between that first photo and the second one, but you can still see some of those blue/turquoise hues behind all of the warm orange and red layers I put on top. After some struggle, I ended up deciding that I couldn’t make this piece work as one painting so I decided to cut the paper into three smaller paintings. I finished the other two pieces before finishing this one. I could not figure out where to take this painting. The painting that is featured in this blog is on the right side in the photo above.
The next time I worked on this piece it changed a lot. I pretty much covered up all the layers underneath so much that even I didn’t think that this was the same painting as the photo above! I ended up darkening it quite a bit, and really wasn’t sure that I should keep working on it. So again, I set it to the side and worked on other pieces.
I ended up finishing this piece, or figuring out how to finish this piece, because lately I have been painting over areas of paintings that I don’t like with the color gray. I happened to be working on a few other paintings at the time and this one happened to surface from a pile of other unfinished duds. I figured I had nothing to lose because I really didn’t like the painting anyway. I hit it first with a dark gray and then added a few dashes of lighter gray and just like that I loved it so much I’m planning to do a much larger version!