I hope everyone enjoyed their weekend, the weather here in Pittsburgh has been perfect for the last nine days and we are sucking it up while we can.

  Today I thought I'd share with you how I go about thinning my oil paint to do long thin lines and detail work. I perfer to keep things simple on most of my framed oil paintings so all I use is quality oderless paint thinner. There are many,many mediums out there for the oil painter, but I found thinner alone doe's what I'm looking for as far as making the paint the right "viscosity" for whatever I'm trying to do. The only thing to avoid is thinning the paint too much which can lead to a painted layer cracking and flaking off. A good rule of thumb if you use a wooden palette like me, is having little to no "palette color" showing thru the paint mixture.

  The only other time I really thin my paint is when I'm doing glazing. I like to use Robert Gamblin's line of glazing mediums. Glazing for those of you not familer with the term, is putting a thin transparent paint over top of another paint layer that has dried.An example would be painting a thin transparent yellow over a blue, the color will now appear green. I have the smallest size in each since I don't do it that much in my framed oil paintings, and since I'm still feeling my way out with them. Winsor&Newton makes some nice mediums for glazing as well and along with Gamblin, offer a full line of mediums to produce varoius effects with the paint so feel free to experiment.
 
  Thats it for today so as always, leave me a post on your thoughts and I'll see you again on Wednesday. Have a great day!