The Value of Repainting an Image

As a boy, I painted in both oil and watercolors. Forty years ago, I decided that bouncing back and forth between the two was holding me back from becoming proficient in either.

I felt watercolor was the most difficult of the two mediums and decided to give up my oils and focus exclusively on watercolors. Consequently, I painted solely in watercolor for the next fifteen years.

I painted from a wet palette and often used color straight from the tube. These paintings were highly rendered; there was nothing filmy or washy about those later watercolors. Interestingly, over that decade and a half, my watercolors began to look more and more like oil paintings, but with the absence of painterly brushwork.

Here are a few examples of those highly rendered, pigment saturated watercolors.

When I felt proficient with watercolors, I decided to paint in oils again and have painted in both mediums ever since, often choosing the medium based on the subject that was to be rendered. My landscapes were usually rendered in oil. Still-life paintings, including fish, were painted in watercolor.

My first oil after a fifteen-year hiatus was “Lanin at Dawn”.

Over time my focus shifted almost entirely to painting in oils, and nowadays, watercolors rarely make an appearance in my art. Additionally, I’ve recently renewed my interest in rendering in pencils.

Recently, I have found personal value in occasionally repainting some of those early watercolors as an oil, reveling in the freedom of brush work.