Speed your painting journey by knowing the best techniques. Brad Teare expands and adds to the best of his Thick Paint Blog-a site dedicated to painting with thick texture.
One of the most critical aspects of thick painting, and the most mystifying, is loading the brush. By loading the brush I mean any means of getting paint onto your brush which includes swiping, dipping, and scraping. The most common method of loading the brush is to premix mounds of paint and then swipe the brush loosely through these mounds. For this technique to be effective it is best if the paint is very creamy which might mean that you need to premix your paint with some kind of medium. This is especially true with some pigments that tend to be a bit stiff like the cadmium colors.
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Even if you premix medium with your paint this method can lead to strokes of color with basically just one solid pigment or a few anemic shards of color. Such strokes will look static and heavy no matter how bright the color may be. For maximum field effect you need to introduce robust slivers of complementary color into a stroke so it will look lively and bright. There are a variety of ways to get this effect. The one I prefer is to use the palette knife to load the brush.
To load the brush with a palette knife I mix a series of colors, generally of similar values. If I'm painting a sky, for example, I mix at least three patches of color that when combined are very similar in value to the sky I'm painting. I mix a blue that is a little bit yellowish (a dab of Thalo Blue, white, and Cadmium Yellow Light). I mix a blue that is a bit reddish (Indigo Blue, Cadmium Red, and white) and a cool blue of equal value as the other mixtures (Titanium White with Indigo Blue).
I then take these three colors and very loosely swipe them with the palette knife (using my left hand). I then apply this mixed pigment to a large flat bristle brush by swiping the bristle brush (which I hold in my right hand) across the mixture on the palette knife. I very carefully and slowly apply this paint to the canvas, usually keeping the handle very parallel to the canvas and laying the color on almost like I would with a palette knife. You can imagine that this process is enhanced by the paint being of a creamy consistency. With a bit of practice you will be able to quickly pick up paint from your palette with the palette knife in your left hand, apply it to your brush, and then apply the broken color to the canvas.
I share this technique not because I insist it's a superior way to apply paint but to demonstrate a very controlled method of getting a variety of vibrant paint on the brush. It may seem complicated but if you rely on swiping your brush through a messy palette of thick paint to get variegated color you might be disappointed or frustrated. It isn't necessary to paint every stroke using such a controlled method, it is more time consuming than swiping the brush through mounds of paint several times to get variegated color, but it is extremely useful in painting areas that need energy and vibration like foliage, skies, roads, or any main point of interest. I often apply the strokes using this technique in the last 10% of the painting process.
The most common method to get multi-hued strokes, and I use this method quite frequently, is to use the brush to pick out bits of color from mounds of paint on the palette-being careful not to over mix as you pull paint onto the brush. This has the advantage of being much faster. This method is harder to control because I tend to get lazy and start using paint right out of the tube. I find it is much easier to get things right if I carefully mix the values of the color families and then commingle them, swiping through mounds of various colored paint. This more conscious method also allows me to adjust the paint's viscosity.
