Drying Phases and Autumn's Golden Glow

Did you know it takes approximately 6 months to 1 year for an oil painting to dry? Some professionals claim it may take several years. Most oil paintings will take a week or two to dry to the touch, but caution must be taken because the layers below the surface layer will still be drying. Oil paints dry due to the oxidation that occurs when pigments bind to air.

Factors that effect the drying time are:

1. Humidity

2. Pigments

3. Technique

4. Medium

Techniques such as impasto, heavy bodied paint will take longer as well as the type of medium used. For artists, there are different types of mediums such as alkyd mediums and cobalt driers available to accelerate the drying time. Some I ran across a tip from, if my memory serves me correct, William F. Martin had made a suggestion on the topic to simply place some books next to your painting on a flat surface then simply stack a piece of foam core on top which will trap most of the dust while still letting the air circulate. For me, I just used another canvas on top as you can see in the photo. 

This happens to be my most recent painting, titled Autumn's Golden Glow, just finished a few days ago. You can watch this painting coming to life by clicking on the link below. 

Autumn's Golden Glow coming to life

Here is the final painting which will be oiled out as needed and varnished when dry, as it is very important to wait until an oil painting dry before varnishing to avoid cracking and peeling. 

This painting was inspired by the gorgeous glowing Fall colors which never seem to last long enough. This beauty has now been captured on canvas to enjoy all year. When this 24x30 painting is dry, it will be available for purchase. Meanwhile, prints are available on my Fine Art America page:

 tina-adamsstoffel.fineartamerica.com

or at Pixels.com

 Pixels.com

By Tina A Stoffel Arts

Happy New Year

In with the new, I'll be finishing this gorgeous painting soon. The beautiful glowing colors of the fall gets my wheels spinning as an artist. The colors are so beautiful and bold that I want to capture them on canvas. Fall is such a beautiful season, but the bold glowing colors seem to fade away all to soon. Now, this beautiful yellow glowing tree is almost completely finished and captured forever.

Unfortunately with a couple of bouts of rough colds set me back on top of holiday festivities with my two young children. I managed to get one painting session in over their two week break. One more session should do the trick. You will be amazed at how far this has come along and how much it's come to life just since this picture was taken. 

2013 in Review

As 2013 comes to a close, I'd like to step back and take a review of this year and what is in store for next year.   

Lately I found myself pulled away from my painting due to holiday festivities, a crashed computer, file loss and fighting off a few bouts of colds which left me with too little new material to update, so I decided this would be a good time to review and show you some of my works from this year. 

Most of these are available on my Fine Art America page http://fineartamerica.com/art/all/tina+a+stoffel/all, but a couple of them were just experiments. I enjoyed painting every single one of these so much that time would just slip away. 

As a full time Mom of two young boys and just beginning in this field (at least the painting part) this was all I could crank out for this year. My goal next year is to obviously continue to improve, pick up my speed, do more sketching (especially when painting time is limited) and more paintings. Currently I have 3 commissioned requests.

This weekend I plan to hit the easel to finish a fall painting I started then it's off to the commission work and a little something special I have planned for a special friend going through some tough life challenges. Keep checking back for updates. 

Meanwhile, as the current year closes and a new one approaches, I'd like to remind you this is a good time to back up  your important files in more than one place so you don't lose them as I did recently from my back up drive. Lat but not least, I'd like to wish you and your loved ones a wonderful, healthy and happy New Year. 

Speed Sketching and Some of My Paintings

Here are some of my paintings

I'm planning to add many more. Keep checking in.

Th topic on my mind this week is Speed Sketching, I had a conversation with two artists this week about speed sketching. Also, this technique was part of some coursework I took at Herron School of Art. I confess, I got away from it, but definitely plan to work this back into my schedule.

Here are a few helpful links I found on the topic:
Rapid/Speed Drawing Exercises

Artist Daily currently has a free e-book offer on this topic. Check it out here:
Artist Daily Sketching

Your Art, Files, and Safety

Do you have photos of your work stored in files? Do have a safe backup method? I thought I did, but after about 6 weeks of attempting to fix a computer that is still under warranty, I managed to get it back only to find my new Terabyte external back up did not transfer.

What do you do when your backup drive fails? Would you go to the manufacturer and haggle it out, or go to a computer tech who may be able to recover all or some of your files?

Having your files backed up in more than one place is the best bet. Ultimately a cloud storage, as I found out the hard way is the best option. The reason I hadn't done this before is security concerns, but according to my technician and the cloud back up claims, they are safer than your bank account.

One last tip today on storage, a professional technician stated the larger the external back-up drive, the more problems they have.

Take it from me, cloud storage is a small price to pay compared to possibly losing your precious data.