Scumbling over Olivier Guimond
Sunday, September 28
On the way to Newfoundland, I stopped to pee at a rest stop in Rigaud, Quebec. The building happened to be named after Oliver Guimond, a Quebecois actor and comedian and there was a photomontage where I learned a little about Olivier and I took a few photos to paint later.
With this little painting, I plan to try a technique that I’ve seen Benjamin Shamback do a lot on his instagram page. Benjamin does a lot of beautiful portraits and he does this thing where he scrubs a really opaque colour on a dry underpainting that already has a lot of nice texture built up. Then he wipes it mostly off and then paints into the newly opened layer. The texture keeps hints of the opaque colour and after several layers of this, he’s left with a wonderfully complex surface.
The application of the opaque paint on top of an already lovely painting also makes for some good video content. See this one for example:
I suppose it’s close to glazing and scumbling but I feel it’s different. It’s not transparent like a working glaze which was made with a pigment and some medium would be. It’s opaque like a scumble but thickly applied. When wiped away, the medium-less paint seems to stain and tone and in the creases of the texture underneath it leaves interesting traces of the colour.
I’ll post another shot after I’ve tried this out.
