There are many benefits to choosing and using artist paints that contain only one pigment, are pre-mixed and are referred to as 'hues'.  You can gain accuracy, save time and most importantly - money.

Single Pigment Artist Paints
The best results in painting come from use of colors based on just one pigment, as opposed to a mixture of multiple ingredients or pigments. A single-pigment color will mix truer and more predictably, and will give the benefit of maximum chromatic intensity possible for that pigment.

A dilemma that many an artist suffers is overworking a piece.  It can be hard to know when to stop and move on to the next piece or to scrape down and start over with the current one.

Have a plan. It makes little sense to attack your painting without some sort of process in place. Creating preliminary sketches and studies (smaller versions of the painting) will help you work through a number of the pictorial issues in advance at a much smaller scale and within a controlled number of variables.  This will make it easier for you to create the finished larger piece without spending precious time working on problems that may have been solved at a much earlier and smaller stage.

Oil paint is the medium I have chosen to express myself.  Oil painting comes from a rich historical tradition.  It comes from a specific visual language of illusion and representation, balancing the gap between the illusion of reality and the reality of physical paint on canvas.  This is done by exploring and pushing the color and composition, and experimenting with mediums, glazes, and washes and so that the line between representation and abstraction begins to blur and the paint has a life of its own which works in tandem with the imagery.

Kimanne Smith's
PAINTING PROCESS

Kimanne Smith has been an oil painter for over 25 years.  Her work is based on traditional oil portraiture in that she is able to capture a likeness of the sitter, however she likes to show more of the painting process than a traditional oil portrait does.  She feels that a painting should not just try to imitate a photograph, but it should also be about the paint itself.

You can see where she begins with oil washes and drips of paint.  Next, she incorporates a wax medium (Dorland¹s Wax Medium) which is a soft wax (and sometimes mixes paint into it) applying it with a palette knife.  After it dries, she uses scumbling, brush strokes and the palette knife to complete the painting.

In this way, the painting emotes depth through these various paint layers which gives the portrait a more intriguing and engaging appearance.  It also gives you a sense of spirituality.

Work Examples