Here is another recent oil painting completed as an in-class demo. It's a portrait of the legendary Chicago Blues musician, Muddy Waters. I worked with a limited palette of colors and painted this on a 16 x 20 home-made canvas board. I worked from a variety of references, both B&W and color. I completed this in one painting session, working wet into wet with oil paint. It's a very direct process and I don't use any mediums with my oils. If I need to thin the paint at all, I will just use a bit of the odorless solvent that I also use to clean my brushes. Many of the painting mediums (including linseed oil) extend the drying time indefinitely. With tight deadlines as an Illustrator, I guess I just learned to paint without them since I was usually trying to minimize drying time.
