The last while I have been trying to force myself to loosen my painting style and move in a more painterly direction.  I started using a combination of palette knives and colour shapers together with a brush to force myself to stop worrying about keeping things inside the lines.  Rather than relax my brushwork I have moved almost completely away from using my brushes.

It is a wonderful tool to add to my arsenal.  I use them for mixing my paints to applying thick bold textured strokes of paint directly onto the canvas.  The palette knives have a flexible blade and different shapes and points allowing you to manipulate the paint into a particular shape or space.  This creates all sorts of opportunities to achieve new effects in colour blending, painterly strokes and expressiveness.  I can now create an impression of a shape with just a sweep of paint onto the canvas with the knife, and the onlooker’s eye will complete the inferred image.  The need for the simplification of the shape forces me to understand the detail of what I am looking at, and then transfer my interpretation onto the canvas.  This does not only require imagination on my part, but challenges the viewer to understand and imagine what they are looking at.

Using a palette knife is easier than it seems. Just like spreading peanut butter on sliced bread.  Initially using a palette knife takes some getting used to, but practice, like with anything, is all you need.  In this particular painting I used a variety of tools other than just palette knives such as scrapers, colour shapers, and marine sponges.  The smooth edged scrapers are great for the background of large canvasses like this, and the marine sponges create lovely soft effects for flowers like Queen Anne’s lace.  The colour shapers are not made for paint application, but rather allow for scratching different lines (broad or thin) into the paint.

The scrapers are great for scraping on underlayers of paint when working with large canvasses.

The marine sponge is great for creating an affect of the more delicate flowers or flowers that are clumped together like hydrangeas. For the more delicate flowers the sponge would be applied lightly with only a little paint. For the hydrangea I would place a lot of paint on the sponge and then smoosh it onto the surface. After the smooshing I would dab light applications of different colours onto the smooshed paint to create some depth to the flower.

Some of my colour shapers and palette knives used for this painting. I have a large variety of palette knives of varying sizes which create different effect as seen in the below close-ups. Some of the knives not featured are quite heavy duty for the application of acrylic mediums, some of which can be quite sticky and gooey to apply so a heavier and and a hardier palette knife is required.

I am still learning, and thankfully always will still be learning as I grow in my art.  Most importantly of all is to have fun and enjoy the process, which makes what I do exciting for me.