Texture

Guana Island  12 x 16

Julie  Recently, I’ve been using a palette knife to create my oil paintings. It is easy to paint different textures with the use of the palette knife. In this example, I’ve kept the sky in the background smooth. It isn’t the focus of the painting and I want it to recede. The mountains have a lot of texture created with heavy paint and dark color choices. I wanted to give the effect of tropical vegetation. There is some texture in the water, but not a lot. It’s a fairly calm day at sea with lightly crashing waves on the shore. 

Annika with Fairy Wings  9.5 x 14.5

Marie  Texture gives a painting interest, mood, and the feeling that you know how things feel within a painting.  In watercolor, texture is created by granulating paint, hard edges, and value contrast.  A lack of texture can be as mood evoking as an abundance of texture.  In the painting above, I used texture sparingly to create a dreamy mood.  The colors in the skin blend softly together giving the appearance of a smooth texture.  The shirt contains granulating paint for a rougher texture.  I included a few hard, irregular brush strokes on the grass to show additional texture, although to keep the mood dreamy, I didn’t contrast the values much or make the brush strokes mimic grass.    The texture in the foliage in the background is also subdued to keep the mood dreamy, but, once again, a few hard edges and some value contrasts in addition to granulating paint tell us it’s plants without painting every leaf.  My favorite part of the painting, the edge of Annika’s wing with feathery edges, was made by blurring the edge between the wing and the background.  Sometimes dreamy paintings can appear blurry and uninteresting, but I tried to avoid this by making clear delineations between edges within Annika herself and including the touch of detail in blowing hair wisps. 

Stay tuned next week when Julie and I discuss color!