Studio wall · 8 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
- 2026-09-21 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.