On a knife’s edge

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

■ How to use a crown-shaped knife

■ Add interest to your seascapes

■ Build your colour-mixing confidence

Painting seascapes is a great opportunity to exploit the palette knife fully and enjoy some of the rich textures and forms that can be created with it. I like to use oil paint for this approach, as it is more forgiving and will allow areas within the painting to be manipulated whilst still wet to create smooth or textured surfaces.

The combination of knives that work well for me are: the teardrop-shaped RGM 4, the angled blade of the RGM 109, which has a non-stick coating, and a crown-shaped knife, made by Starvast (Figure 1, above left). Each knife makes their own unique contribution of marks to the production of a painting.

Techniques

I like to take an approach with oil paint when producing seascapes. This is a direct