Studio wall · 16 published
Paint dries one layer at a time
No finished-work gallery here, only order of operations: what goes down first, how long it waits, whether the next film is leaner or fatter, and where the colour finally comes from. Each note carries a film cross-section whose band heights are that layer's drying time.
New entries are released a few at a time. Anything whose date has not arrived is not on this wall and has no page. The archive filters by method, medium and copy breakdown.
Newest first
- 2026-10-19 Monet's Rouen series: painting the same thing thirty times What changes between canvases when the subject does not.
- 2026-10-15 Acrylic glazing liquids and the open-time problem How to get twenty minutes of workable time out of a medium that dries in five.
- 2026-10-12 Sargent's Lady Agnew: how few strokes a face can take Counting the actual brushstrokes in the head, and the drying schedule that allowed them.
- 2026-10-08 Sgraffito and scratch-back on acrylic grounds Cutting a line instead of drawing it, and the film thickness that makes it work.
- 2026-10-05 Alkyd mediums: faster drying without wrecking the film How much to add, what it does to gloss, and where it goes wrong.
- 2026-10-01 Copying late Rembrandt: impasto over a thin ground The huge contrast between a barely-there ground and a heavily loaded highlight.
- 2026-09-28 Scumbling: the dry-brush haze that unifies a picture A near-dry brush and an opaque light colour, used to cool without covering.
- 2026-09-24 Turpentine vs odourless mineral spirits: what the difference actually costs you Solvency, evaporation rate, and why the cheap option is sometimes the wrong one.
- 2026-09-21 Wet-into-wet: finishing in one sitting A single-session method with a hard time limit and no second chances.
- 2026-09-18 Acrylic mediums: matte, gloss, and what they do to colour The same pigment can shift two value steps depending on the medium you mix in.
- 2026-09-12 Palette knife impasto that will still be there in ten years Ridge height, paint loading and the drying problems nobody warns you about.
- 2026-09-06 Copying Vermeer: the glaze stack in The Milkmaid Reading a seventeenth-century surface as a sequence of films rather than a magic trick.
- 2026-08-31 Linseed oil vs stand oil: choosing the right body Two oils from the same seed, behaving like different materials on the palette.
- 2026-08-25 From grisaille underpainting to colour glaze A four-step route from a grey wash drawing to a full-colour finish.
- 2026-08-19 Fat over lean, explained without the folklore Why a rigid upper film cracks, and how to count oil content layer by layer.
- 2026-08-14 Three-pass glazing: building depth without mud A verdict-first look at what actually changes between pass one, two and three.