“Spend more time mixing on the palette, and less time touching your painting” Ken Goshen, artist & teacher.

Good advice I reckon. It’s something I’ve been trying to get into the habit of doing lately. Before you dive in and start laying any paint on the canvas, I’ve found it’s well worth spending some time mixing a few colours that suit your purpose and work well together. As you gain experience you’ll speed up this preliminary process. Be generous, mix globules of colour that are much larger than you think you’ll need. At the end of the day, I mix together any paint remaining on my palette to make a neutral grey, and use it as an underpainting for my next work. I find that as the painting progresses I intermix the colours I’ve pre-prepared, adding a little bit of one into the other in order to establish a unity and coherence to the painting.

An early evening walk along the clifftops at Rhosili, Gower.

10″ x 10″, oil on canvas board.