Palette Knife Painting

Artist's Statement:

The idea was to use only palette knives for this project. I had the idea that this would involve lots of large swatches of paint, instead of the regular small brushstrokes. For this reason I wanted to use a photo reference that was pretty blurry and had lots of flat swatches of colors. I had the idea of doing a city scape, because I wanted to challenge myself to do non-organic shapes. I also thought that a city scape would suit the rough kind of painting that palette knife work results in.

We use hard canvas board for the paintings, which were square, so we had to take that into account when thinking of composition. In this case I decided to crop some of the sky out the the reference photo. We also had to work exclusively with palette knives. This meant that I needed to be careful about what direction my strokes went. I ended up using the flat bit for most strokes, but did use the edge a bit for some of the highlights.

My process was to start with the bacground and some of the base colors first, and then build up off of that. I wanted to do my best to do the colors justice, but it was difficult to mix some of the right shades and tints. I also had some trouble with getting even application of the paint. However, I am pretty happy with the results, even though they are more abstract that I am used to. It adds character to the painting, and makes it interestig to look at.