The Barn Auger Painting

Yes sir, here I go again with another large tool portrait painting. This tool nearly took up all the space in my still life staging area. I have some plans in the works for expanding my current staging area. Actually my intentions are to build a completely new staging area from scratch and make it 3 times larger. I have some wood ready to go, I even made a few cuts, but I have to finish all the paintings in my current queue before I can bring myself to this new task.  Maybe next month… I’ll keep you posted!

Once I commit to building a new still life staging area, I will have quite a mess on my hands. I need to make certain that paintings are not going to get covered in saw dust and sweat!

This oil painting of an old barn auger was mostly fun to paint. The threads towards the bottom of the tool were the trickiest part. But you were probably thinking that as well weren’t you? I’ve painted threads before and while they do get easier with practice they are tricky to get right.  At first glance they appear to be all identical and even if that was true in the physical world they cannot be painted that way.  The threads look different depending on their elevation.  Recall how the top of a cylinder changes when it is closer or farther away from your eye level.

I did a few sketches in my sketchbook to prepare myself for the challenging threads. When it came time to paint I had an extremely accurate line drawing from which to apply the paint to. I cannot stress this enough when painting complicated objects. Don’t wing it with paint and hope for the best. Create a really accurate line drawing first.

More time spent getting things right in the form of a drawing means less time fixing paint later.