part 2:The gear

1)gloves- gloves can help a lot, if you are finished with your painting session, you can take them off and you will not have to find a place to wash your hands, and of course it is nice to have clean hands after such an ordeal. The downside is, that you have less feeling in your hands and gloves can get anoying and sweaty, especially in the summer. You may find yourself wasting time, taking them off to let your hands have some air. It depends on who you are, and what do you want to deal with, the uncomfortable gloves during the session, or the dirty hands afterwards. Both have advantages and disadvatages. I often don't wear the gloves, and bear the after effect in exchange for a more organic experience while painting.

2) paint box- This is perhaps the most unused, but the most useful. This makes the trip home really easy if you don't have a car, you just put the wet painting in and carry the box around like a portfolio. I have had so much trouble carrying wet paintings on the subway and buses. It always falls, someone always wants to brush up against it(in which case I get off the train or bus as soon as possible!)
You can make your own paint box pretty easy. Just get a box that isn't too deep,(if it is as deep as a shoe box it's too deep. Or just get foam core and make your own. attach 4 inch sides(also foam core) to your foam core with tape and/or glue, and get another foam core board the same size as your first and attach it on one side, so that you can open it. put tape inside, so that when you put the canvas inside the box, it will stick the tape. Put a handle on the side (you can use tape that has been rolled up and wrinkled and tape it on the box. I will post a better explanation or how to make a paint box soon.

3)umbrella?-an Umbrella can be very useful, I have never used one myself yet, but if you look at pictures of great landscape painters on the job, they always have one with them. This is because having an umbrella on hand can help with a very annoying problem, and that is GLARE! Glare can drive you nuts. Wet oil paint shines...alot! So when direct or indirect light hits your painting, you can't see your colors at all. or you think you see them, but when you bring your painting back inside you get surprised, you thought a shadow was deep enough but it wasn't!

4) Palletes- I recommend using those air tight pallette boxes. Disposable pallete paper fits right inside them. It saves paint for days, sometimes weeks (depending on which colors you have, some dry faster than others), and you can put paint inside there before you head out. One thing to try is this: Before you head out glob on your colors into the pallete and take extra pallete paper with you (I put a bunch in the pallete box, so I don't have to keep puttin new ones in.) and make sure to take a pallete knife with you. This way you won't have to take any paint tubes with you. This is of course risky, because if you find the need to get thick in some areas, you might end up depleting your paint and will have nothing to paint with. so you may want to take just a couple of tubes for emergency. a red, a blue, yellow and white. You still carry less tubes and you can start faster when you paint, because all your colors are set up already.

part 1:light or heavy?

so I have been doing a lot of landscape painting lately, but I lack a digital camera and scanner, so I am having trouble posting the results. But soon enough I will have them up.

I figured why not blabber on about landscape painting a bit since I don't have the stuff up yet.
I want to talk about a very important topic and that's wheather to go light or heavy?

You first reation might be "well that's easy, just go light". But it's not that easy.

You see bring a lot of stuff with you to go landscape painting might actually help you.
If you are using oil paints you load is almost always heavy.

possible things to bring with you are: You have to bring you your brushes, tubes of paint, paper towels, pallette, easel, canvas, umbrella (yes umbrella!) pallette knife, gloves, paint box, brush soap and medium (thinner, liquin, etc)

You might be thinking why the heck do I need all this crap? Well the hard fact is that going landscape painting with oils takes a lot of endurance, Oil gets everywhere, on your hands, your clothes, your face, underneath your fingers, everywhere! So why even use it? Well that's simple, because it is probably the best medium. As many things in life, the things you have to strive hardest for are really the ones worth getting.

Believe it or not, sometimes bringing more stuff with you actually makes it easier! Let me demonstrate in part 2:the gear

Smithsonian

Here is an interesting link, to the smithsonian museum web-site.
It talks about the challenges in painting a landscape and breifly a couple of top notch landscape painters.

Welcome

Hi, everyone and welcome to my landscape painting blog, many fun things to come!