Everything becomes a little more difficult as the dimension increases. What I mean is: I am painting outside with bigger canvases and I am aware of the exponentially growing difficulties. Let me just make a short list of things I have discovered.
Firstly, you use a lot of paint and turpentine. Some colours are costly so naturally, you are inclined to save. This is a mistake. You just can’t obtain rich colours with poor materials. The same can be said for the quality of paintbrushes and the canvas.
Now the area on the palette where you mix the colours is quite manageable. Not so when you are mixing a large amount of colour. You need more room. This has caused me to squeeze out the colours very near the edge of the palette in order to have more room at center to mix. Unfortunately when I lean towards the canvas to reach the high parts, my clothes brush against the palette and get into the paint.
Once on the site, the big canvas causes pedestrian problems. People actually walk closer to the the easel for some odd reason. I have bumped into people walking behind me when I step back to look at the painting.
The transport of the big canvas is also a problem. As I walk from the worksite to my car, I am constantly dodging people as they don’t understand even the slighted contact with the wet canvas is potentially disastrous. Getting the painting into the car to take home has also caused numerous new ‘spots’ of colour on the car upholstery and ceiling.
I shouldn’t be complaining. I’m posting a picture of Philip Pearlstein painting a large watercolour near a British cathedral. I saw pictures of him tying down his watercolour support when he went to Jerusalem in 1986.
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