I have been using that new pallete for a little while now getting used to how it handles. I have found that it makes my life much easier. the only thing that I believe I am still off on is the clean up of it. as I am using a wood pallete now and I am still throwing out too much paint. The Tera Rosa that I am using seems like it is seperating from the oil it has in its tube. I will have to order some better paint as I am using Grumbacher's paint and it seems to week.

I have been working with the neutral gray trying to bring the chroma under some control in the painting. I feel that the painting is going in a good direction but now realise that my initial drawing was a bit off and that I will need to tighten my way of viewing my reference a bit. I will post an image of my easel alterations as I go.

I used a similar pallete setup to what Marvin Mattleson uses on Tuesday of this week. I layed out 4 rows of color in 9 different values only mixing between the same color value. It was amazing at how simple it made my decisions. I had no mud going on.

The colors I used were Ivory black and white for a gray line, burnt umber and yellow ochre for a yellow strain, Aliziarin mixed with bright red for my warm red line, and finally primrose and violet ultramarine for my cool red line. I took these to 9 values with the addition of titanium white. I am using cheap paint and will adjust my colors when I get caught back up in a month or two. The colors that I plan on purchasing will be either Holbein or Old holand.

I switched from a glass pallete to a more traditional wooden pallete that had a white primer on it when I purchased it. I will still look for a better pallete as I am not totally liking it but it was easier to deal with than the two ply glass pallete that I used before.

The only problem I have is that I used my computer to boost the size of the image while I painted and it added more red to the image than exists in the actual photograph of my wifes picture. So now I will have to go back in and adjust for that so that she does not look like I abused her.

I have just recently gave oilstrokes a major needed facelift. In this fact some things are in transition from the old site. I apologize for the errors in pages coming in from search engines. I will be creating a site map page that should help with the current problems.

also I have added a link on the home page of oilstrokes.com so that you can easily add oilstrokes.com to your browsers start page.

This will make it possible for you to easily have oilstrokes.com to be the first page you see in your browser when you start your browser.

The link only works inside of IE 5.0 based browsers as it uses some of the browsers functions.

If you wish to reset the browsers start page and are lost e-mail me from my contact form and i will try and help you. Thanks for your support and visit my weekly notes for updates with my techniques and areas that have changed on the oilstrokes website.