Christmas Art Breakthrough

I’m so pleased with this year’s festive art work, not only because so many friends and family members have said how much they like it. I’m delighted because the painting marked a major development in my acrylic painting (the first of my Christmas breakthroughs).

A bit of personal art history

I have been ‘doing art’ for as long as I can remember. One of my childhood memories is of coming across some old metal tubes of dried-up oil paint with stained and faded labels. Very excitingly, this was grown-up paint that I wasn’t allowed to use, or even touch. So of course it had a magical attraction for me straight away!

As a teenager, I did begin to use oil paints. And over the years since school I have had a varied mixture of artistic instruction. We had an art room with a tutor for students at my college, I’ve been on various courses and to classes and learnt from artist friends. The result of this patchy training was that by my 30s I could produce a good oil painting in terms of the image, but had no technical knowledge of the materials.

I’d heard of ‘fat over lean’ and ‘oiling out’, but I didn’t really know what they meant. In my final attempts at oil painting, I tried to apply what little I’d picked up about them, with the result that the paintings went badly brown and shrunken in places.

Action and circumstance

I decided that as soon as I had the opportunity, I needed to undertake proper study of the technical aspects of oil painting. And then circumstances changed, and it was a long time until that opportunity came about. By then I was living in a different place, and although the opportunity for study was available, the space and environment were not suitable for oils with their slow drying and strong fumes.

This was when I decided to take up acrylics. Actually, I’d grown up with a very negative idea of them. They had none of the magic of those old, forbidden paint tubes! And I’d had one art tutor who had specifically compared them to the emulsion you put on walls and told me to avoid them as they had no character or beauty.

Technical developments

I’m fairly sure that the technology behind acrylic paints has improved greatly since then. And some of it was perhaps prejudice too. But they are still very different to oil paints, as I soon discovered. Particularly in drying time: acrylics dry fast.

I am a slow worker. I like to lose myself in the detail of the painting. I like to make a few colour mixes with the knife at the start and then tweak and mix with a brush as I go. And, quite often, I like to paint wet-on-wet (adding wet paint onto a painted surface that is still wet). I was soon in trouble with all of these techniques. A lot of paint that had dried on my palette while I was working was wasted (and it’s not cheap!). I was unable to mix into previous mixes, because they’d dried. And attempts at wet-on-wet became simple overpainting, because the under layer was already dry.

I was still producing acceptable-looking work, but I was not enjoying the process! I was uncomfortable painting, and not feeling that the finished works were truly my style.

Christmas Tree Breakthrough

And then, just like magic, things came together in this picture. It’s almost always the way with the technical side of creative work that if you just keep going one day you just ‘get it’ and everything falls into place. With the use of Gloss Glazing Medium (a mixing medium for acrylic paints that increases flow, gloss and drying time), a stay-wet palette and a few other ad hoc additions, I was suddenly painting in my old familiar way, but with acrylics.

Stages

Stage 1

In this case I am using canvas board, although I often prefer a smooth board. I’m not a lover of stretched canvas as I don’t enjoy the ‘give’ you get in response to your strokes.

I have put a colour wash over the board and drawn the scene in lightly in pencil

Stage 2

I have started to paint in the background, building up smooth layers of colour with a synthetic filbert brush. Before starting I mixed some of the background colours and some greens and yellows for the tree and left them on a stay-wet palette.

Stage 3

I like to work from the back to the front as far as possible. The background is now complete. I have sketched in the darkest shadows on the foreground objects to create three-dimensional images.

At this point, I can take advantage of the fast drying time of the paint and step away for a short break to let the background dry. This will allow me to lay the foreground objects on cleanly.

It is also good for my eyes to have a rest!

Stage 4

The foreground objects are mostly laid in using a smallish hogs hair brush and a thin synthetic sable-type. I’ve used wet-on-wet here, but then let it dry before the next stage.

Stage 5

The foreground objects are finished, mostly using the thin sable-type brush. The front parcels are particularly tricky because the image was not set up with painting in mind and the lighting on these very neutral objects is rather ambiguous. I decide to tweak them at the end.

Stage 6

I lay in the tree and the tinsel using the hogs’ hair brush. I tend to be a tight, detailed worker and the background and foreground objects are all in that style. For the tree itself, I want to paint much more loosely and freely in contrast.

I usually work with a small palette of colours. So far on this painting I have used Titanium White, Burnt Umber, Burnt Sienna, Ultramarine Blue and Cadmium Yellow Light. At this stage, I thought that another yellow might have been a better choice!

I also have the Gloss Glazing Medium on my palette.

Stage 7

The tree, tinsel and lights are complete. I was concerned that the centre of the tree looked too flat, and my stern resident critic JB agreed. So I did a little more on that before completing the decorations.

I have worked wet-on-wet quite a lot here in an attempt to get some glow and sparkle. Now I let the painting dry so that I can lay the hanging decorations on top. But I keep some of the greens and yellows on the stay-wet palette to deal with overlaps and touching up.

Stage 8

The finished painting. I added some Cadmium Red Medium to my palette and worked in the decorations in two layers. I worked wet-on-wet in each layer but let the paint dry in between layers so that I could lay clean light and shadow over the colour.

I also tweaked the difficult foreground parcels, although I think that they remain the weak spot of the painting.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this insight into my new-found painting process and rhythm. Reliving it has been a pleasure for me and made me want to get painting again!

A Different Seasonal Breakthrough

An instant to reflect

It wouldn’t be Christmas and New Year without some reflections on the past year and on the future soon to come. The combination of the solstice (here in the Northern Hemisphere at least), a close-to-universal holiday and the start of a new year make it the most appropriate time for that. If you know some mathematics, you might know that if an object is moving in one direction it has to have an instant of stillness before it can begin moving in the opposite direction. That’s exactly how Christmas feels to me, that moment of stillness before a change of direction. It’s one of the reasons I love it so much.

High Society

I happened to be rewatching an old movie this morning: High Society. It’s a good quality, entertaining film combining an well-constructed stage play with a score by the incomparable Cole Porter and a star cast on top form. One of Porter’s lyrics from ‘Well, Did You Evah!’ caught my attention:

Have you heard it’s in the stars

Next July we collide with Mars?

Well, did you evah?

What a swell party this is!

I thought that this summed up rather well what it feels like to be alive at this time. Everywhere you turn things are disintegrating and getting worse. Violence, destruction and horrors abound and we are acclerating on the path of our own destruction.

Taking Back Control

I’ve been feeling resentful about all this. I am by nature a happy and optimistic person (JB thinks idiotically so!), but I could no longer be so in the face of such a continual onslaught of human stupidity of the nastiest kind. I felt that I was being robbed of my true nature.

But I’ve had enough of this. I can’t pretend that I think things are going to get better in the near future, either globally or personally. Still I’m going to fight back and do everything I can to maintain the natural human joy, love and hope that is within me as much as I can for as long as I can.

Starting as I mean to go on

With that in mind, I most sincerely send you my love and best wishes for this holiday time. I look forward to sharing more creative work filled with fun, joy, love and hope with you in 2026.

Have a swell party everyone!