I’ve now applied additional layers of colour and added highlights and shadows. This is delicate work, oil paint has the consistency of thick butter and as such can be tricky to manipulate. That the paint dries so slowly is both a blessing and curse, the blessing is you can continue moving it around and making changes for several days if not weeks. The curse is that by moving the paint around you can effectively pull if off the canvas and end up going back to the white gesso layer. The slow drying also means that upon completion the painting will take many weeks to fully dry. The flip side is that the paint is so beautiful when dry, much more so than acrylic paint which always looks somewhat synthetic. I think the painting is complete, however I may well tinker with it over the coming weeks if I spot something I’m not happy with.
