Q: “was wondering if you could give any tips on how to start a painting starting from the base wash to the blending, blending in particular i'm not sure how to go about manipulating the paint to achieve the desired effect >.<
any advice is appreicated, thanks”

-- I often get questions like this. How to paint, or what is your method questions. It is always a hard and lengthy thing to figure out how to type, so I figured that I would answer this in a journal so that many people can read it and it can save me time in the future. I always love helping out, but sometimes I get busy. --

A: Well, it is hard to explain without the ability to demonstrate, but here it goes. I use a canvas with a self-added gesso base to smooth it out. I start out with a drawing of what I am going to do. Almost like creating a self-made paint by numbers. I Draw out the shapes of the objects, but also where the shadows and highlights or and major color changes happen. I even many times loosely shade it to be able to easily spot the shadows and such.

Then the under painting... I use watered down paints - this is a lot like using water colors. And I do my best to quickly block in tones and colors. It shouldn't be perfect, but it should be close to a balance of light-dark and colors, as your painting would be (only at about half of the value) You don't use white during this step, your canvas is your white, and you use water to lighten your colors. (much like water color)

Then comes the build up. You should still be able to make out your under-drawing at this point. You should use regular thickness of paint (and you can use white now) and start actually filling it all in. Starting with shadows and the background is highly recommended. You should try your best to build up the painting as one. Don't start in one corner and finish in the other. What will happen if you do that is, for 1/2 of the painting you will be guessing a lot because you are painting without seeing the rest of the painting to compare it to. If you work on mostly the darks of the whole thing, then pull up the midtones, and then the highlights, You will get a much better result with less correcting. On each of these steps (shadow,middle,light) if you are doing the background as priority 1 and then following with the focus piece (foreground) then you will have more of a reference point when you are painting the foreground. Everybody always wants to dive in on the main subject, but how many times have you worked really hard and gotten the main subject just the way you want it. Only, after you paint the background you realize that the whole foreground is too light (or dark, or green, or whatever).

Now you are ready to go in and start blending. You usually blend from light to dark (the lighter paint is less opaque and the darker color will shine through it more). Blending is done easiest by getting the color on your brush that you are going to blend with, wiping it off of your brush with a paper towel, and then painting with your dry-brush. This makes a semi-transparent raking effect that is perfect for blending. You can also blend by using glazes to make a semi transparent paint (kind'a like watering it down but with a gel-medium) I find this less effective and more time consuming. It is great though for color correction. Say there was an apple in your painting, and you got it down but the whole thing isn’t yellow enough. Adding yellow to some glaze and painting the whole apple with it works wonders, with little touch up needed afterwards.

I hope that this helps. - Drew