What is your favorite medium and why?

Lilikins

Hello everyone! I’ve been away for awhile due to moving to a new house and changing jobs but life has finally settled enough for me to come back to this wonderful site. Hopefully in the next few months I’ll get back in to painting once we finally unpack all these boxes!

What mediums have you all tried and what is your favorite?

I will start: acrylic and watercolor. I used to hate acrylic due to the quick drying time but I grew to love that trait. It means that if I’m not happy with something I can just wait 5 minutes and change it again and again and again. My version of the girl with the pearl earring easily went through 20 nose jobs. I love the look of watercolors but it does require a measure of patience and the ability to let things go since the paper can’t constant fiddling and corrections. Once all my painting things are unpacked I’d like to try again - maybe with a glass or 3 of wine so my impatience won’t get the better of me 😄

We had an event a while back that encouraged everyone to try a different medium than they usually chose and I think it’s important to remember that you don’t have to stick with oils to create bobs work. Each medium has its own unique traits and trying out different things is part of the joy of painting.

cheers!

Sunnylady

Lilikins Hi Lilikins,
New media that I quite enjoy and which is not expensive compare to oil - is a gouache.
It is water-based, somewhere in the middle between water-colors-acrylics-oil.
Vere opaque and honey-somewhat chemical is a binder of pigment.
Paper is a medium quality water-color paper as it needs to withstand water.
This medium is awesome for sketching as preparatory work for oils, but also a good getaway to painting when one is far away from his/her studio setup for oils. It is an awesome on its own and as I read many illustrators use it.
Soft synthetic brushes work nicely with it and last quite a lot even when you mush them in to create the trees.

I am waiting to go back to my acrylics and see how better now I am with them too as overall experience with oils improves other areas of painting.

Regards,
sunnylady

TheLandscapePainter

hello Lilikins, it's lovely to have you back. You did an amazing job of girl with girl with the pearl earring. If I tried a portrait it would look like Mr Bean's version of "whistler's mother". I like oils and painting bob style gives me a lot of enjoyment. Introducing a different medium would be like starting again and I don't want to work that hard. I'm not lazy, just old lol. I used to watch an artist colleague of mine paint watercolours almost daily, his work was amazing and I was tempted to ask him to teach me to paint except I noticed he always sketched out his work first and that put me off. Before I discovered bob, I did do some florals in acrylic using the one stroke technique but I soon got fed up with that as it was so restricting, or at least, I didn't discover anything else I could do with it. I can't draw, and sketching is out of the question, so I'm sticking with wet on wet. I copied an acrylic painting "sunny morning" by Viktor Yushkevich, he paints in acrylic, but I did mine oil wet on wet and I really loved that experience and it came as a big surprise to me that I could do it at all. I couldn't paint it watching the video as he did so much overpainting so I just copied it from the still picture. He did an amount of airbrushing as well which I had to swerve. I am really pleased I painted that because it made me realise I don't have to follow Bob all the time, I enjoy painting from photographs which has opened up a whole new world.

wybnormal

Oils are my favorite.. I've tried acrylics a few times and I dislike the speed I have to work at. I love watercolors and the look of them. I like working with pastels too but not keen on the issue of them never really drying out and needing to be behind glass. The trick with oils I live for is the ability to walk away for hours or a day or two and come back and keep going even to blending in colors vs laying color down on dried paint. There are days I wish they would dry 🙂 but overall I prefer the long wait times. I'm always changing my mind either a little bit or sometimes, I'll do a wholesales change of a major part of the painting. I'm terrible at deciding a painting is done 😃. I've gone back to paintings a year old and made changes.

Lilikins

TLP: haha Mr beans whistlers mother! On the bright side his version looked much more happy than the original! Drawing is another reason why I hesitate with watercolors. It’s a bit embarrassing how poorly I draw. It’s one of the reasons why my paintings have so many layers. The few watercolors I have done have been from tutorial books that have tracers and I essentially cheated with the drawings so that I can enjoy painting something that doesn’t look like mr bean drew it.

sunnylady: I love your gouache paintings! Of course your oils are stunning but there’s a wonderful sense of freedom and fun I feel when you post the gouache ones. It’s in my list of mediums to try once I get my art studio set up. I also have water based oils that I purchased right before the move buried in a box somewhere.

wybnormal - I completely forgot about pastels!! We had them in grade school and I remembered absolutely loving them but they did leave a big mess on the hands. Then again we were kids so that happened with everything. Also glad to know I’m not the only person that just can’t leave paintings alone. I just wish there was an undo button - sometimes my edit ends up making things worse.

Sunnylady

Lilikins Yes, indeed, with gouache you have to move fast, that is why not much time to think and mush in one place. All thinking is upfront and then you go with the flow wherever it takes 🙂
@Ian_Adkins I want to try charcoal and get messy and hopefully it will improve my value chart control.

Ian_Adkins

Oil is challenging--particularly goopy fatty oils--but I like the ability to rework an area and blend. My "home discipline" within art is graphic design, so I started with acrylic, which lends itself to works with a graphical quality. I have used egg tempera for painting ikons. For life drawing, charcoal and graphite, though I have enjoyed chalk pastels. Not very good with watercolors/ink painting. Never tried gouache but I want to. These days, if I am doing an illustration, I use illustration markers with colored pencil over it for highlights/shadows or to adjust shades (such as skin tones).

Ian_Adkins

@Sunnylady I was made fun of in art school for how fastidious I was with charcoal. If I wasn't wearing gloves, then I would wrap the stick with a tissue. I came away as clean as I'd started the class, whilst others looked like chimney sweeps. If you do get it on your fingers, it will stay in your fingerprints and fingernails/cuticles for the next week.

Sunnylady

Ian_Adkins Thank you for the warning! I thought it would go away quickly with water and soap...Sounds like gloves and long sleeve are going to be my friends.

wybnormal

Badge of honour 😃

[deleted]

My favorite is Ink and wash. This is because this is more to the drawing side and I really like drawing, maybe even more than painting. But I also paint with acrylics and oils. I am just happy when I have a pen or a brush in my hand and create something. So I would not say I dislike any of these painting materials I have yet used (watercolors, acrylics and oils). Every medium has it's advantages and disadvantages if you are objective. Maybe one time I would like to do oils in a different way than the Bob Ross technique.

Mgiese84

Very tough question. Until this year I've done only paintings in acrylics. I stayed away from the oils because the cleanup is a little more work. However, I bought a set of oils earlier this year and have been hooked ever since. I guess it would depend what type of mood I'm in, lol. I also always loved drawing too. That's the most portable and I enjoy drawing on vacations.