Step by Step - equine oil painting by Ivetta Harte, STEP 2

STEP 2

I'm ready to start paining and I take a much diluted oil color and start sketching my composition to the canvas. The color is very faint and transparent; it almost looks like I'm paining with watercolors on a canvas. Oil is so watery and diluted that it runs down my canvas, but I don't care, I just want to have something on my white canvas - I'm scared of plain canvases, so I always try to cover them with paint as soon as I can. I don't use pencils on canvas: first they smear and also can puncture the canvas or just stretch it too deep from the pensile pressure. By using diluted oil, I can see how the composition is playing out in the large size and I can easily paint over it, if it will not work. That's the reason why I'm using diluted oils.