David Gadsby

Bastia Stage 2

Second night working on this now....I've moved on to the under painting. I've been studying the Flemish 7 layer painting technique recently to try and get some pointers on my own technique. The traditional Flemish technique requires 7 weeks of drying time in between 7 successive layers! Needles to say I won't be adhering to that, but the concept of building successive thin layers of tone and then colour is a sound one. Here, I'm copying the early stages of the Flemish technique by building up a tonal painting in thin washes of Raw Umber. I've thinned the oil paint down a lot with turps to produce a very diluted mixture. The aim here is to end up about 1 tone lighter than the finished painting. This picture is still early in the process.

Bastia Stage 1

This is the first stage of the painting, the initial drawing. The drawing's pretty loose at the moment, I'll fill in more of the detail in the under painting stage. I'm only really using it as an approximate guide. Really I think I should be using ink from a pencil transfer since the pencil affects the first layer of paint. To compensate I've covered the drawing with a thin layer of titanium white acrylic to fix the pencil onto the canvas.

Bastia Painting Walkthrough

I've just started a new painted of Bastia from our Corsica trip last year. Since it's the first painting I've started on my new blog I'm going to posting images at each sitting to show how it's progressing.