Landscape Painting - Brush Technique 2

Yesterday, I talked a bit about brush technique. Today I'd like to go a bit further. 

The brush is my preferred way of applying paint to my panels. I also use a pallet knife, but I use the pallet knife in a subtractive way. Mostly to scrape away surface dimples or sometimes to scratch away paint or even to blend passages.

Seldom do I apply paint directly with a knife. Many painters that I consider personal teachers such as Richard Schmid or Bob Rohm do paint with the knife. They both use it very well as do some other landscape painters out there.

Morning Glow by M Francis McCarthy

I guess my biggest issue with pallet knife painting is that it can so easily feel contrived. Students of painting should give it a try though as it can be perfected as a painting implement. It's best used in moderation should you care to use it at all. If you're older like me you will recall the awful overdone impasto paintings that we're so common in the sixties and seventies.

When you're painting you have a nearly infinite number of approaches to your brush handling. You can go with chiseled strokes that are long or short. Or, completely blend out all indication of separate marks.

I like to show a bit of the strokes but I also like my strokes to interweave like a lattice. Diffusion is always an important aspect of my paintings but diffusion that breaks into contrasting edges here and there.

Morning Glow Detail

Here's a detail of Morning Glow that illustrates what I mean. I aim for my brush work to be expressive while also getting the image across.  A good way to look at the brushwork in a painting is that it should look great from afar but also pay off for the viewer that gets up really close. I try to make my marks with character and sensitivity without being overly direct or contrived.

Another good tip I have for aspiring painters is to change-up how they are holding their brush. I like to use every angle of my brushes whether the edge, flat or especially the side. 

I apply paint fairly thinly building up my paint in layers of successive brush strokes. I try to always leave a bit of life in the painting. By that I mean I try not to choke out the layers that went before. I leave a bit of them showing.

When my paintings are most successful in my view they are articulated with an economy of strokes. Many times I will have to apply multiple layers of smaller strokes to a painting to get my desired vision across but it's magical when I can do it in one pass of color over my initial under-painting/drawing.