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Josh Millard @joshmillard

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New work last night and this morning: returning to my iris squares idea but on 12x12 canvas with oils.

Cadmium orange in oils is less neon-vibrant than the glowing acrylics experiment yesterday but I'm really happy with the resulting staircase of color.

Took advice from a friend on stencil brush stippling approach and am very pleased with how much cleaner the resulting lines are compared to a more typical brushstroke application.

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@joshmillard Acrylic lines always seem to be going for maximal saturation in terms of their masstone. Whereas in oils you can find a number of ochres and other low/medium saturation pigments.

Kind of strange to me, but

What is the aim of that particular work?

@pnathan I'm in a pretty exploratory mode right now with materials and techniques; it would be fair to say that with piece I've barely aimed at all. Answering some mechanical and compositional "what if" questions for myself, mostly, in service of future work.

@pnathan And, yeah, I've been all-in on oils for months now, just barely starting to peek at acrylics since they seem like a good fit for some of the geometric/layering things I'm interested in. Flat finish and orders of magnitude faster drying time are both appealing compared to oils which I otherwise like a great deal.

@joshmillard I've been banging away at oils now for a year and a half: I really love them. A new kid has reduced my ability to wander around with wet paint on my fingers so I've started in on acrylics a wee bit. The cheap acrylics feel like pushing plastic around with the brush, the expensive ones are much better. :-/ The nuance of drying speed and the way the body handles is something I'm coming up to speed on though.

(also, if you didn't already know, you can drop a matte varnish on oils)