Medium Moment: Painting on Tile

I’ve enjoyed painting on tile lately, and I’ve made probably about 20 tile paintings so far. Here is what I have learned about making paintings on tile.

A tile might be thought of as a nontraditional surface, yet it works so very well! It helps me to remember that a canvas is simply the best surface that people in the past could come up with at the particular time. Thousands of years of artists painting on rock, wood, canvas, and paper coalesces in canvases being what we largely think of as the best or most common art surface to paint on.

It turns out that painting in oil on tile is easy! I personally didn’t have to prime the surface at all for the kind of painting I do, which is usually impasto-style painting of laying down a thick layer of a neutral color like white or offwhite, and then painting into that layer with deeper color.

Since oil paint is very much made to stick, it doesn’t peel or chip off the tile. If you’ve ever painted on glass, it’s a lot like painting on glass. The paint doesn’t really fall or sink into any canvas, it sits on top of the glass surface and is easy to move around. This is why I think it’s great for impasto painting. It’s sculptural at some levels but still very much about painting and color.

Here are two lupine paintings I made with oil paint:

Oil on tile is awesome.

To paint in gouache on tile, I primed the tile with a thin coat of clear gesso. I am sure white gesso would also work well, I only happened to have clear gesso on hand so that is what I used.

I decided to do priming for gouache painting after attempting to paint without any priming, and this was immediately not a good idea. Maybe if the tile were less smooth or if it were more porous, one wouldn’t have to prime the tile, but I definitely had to prime every single type of tile I’ve had for gouache painting, and I’ve probably used about 4 different types.

These are oil paintings on tile samples

In the spring I had an idea to make paintings of desert night scenes with fantastic galaxies and nebulas, and having a tiny cowboy in the painting somewhere. I call this series the Space Cowboy series, overtly about the ending tag of each Cowboy Bebop episode.

I really enjoyed making these oil paintings on tile. The space cowboy paintings didn’t utilize too much impasto even, I think most of the paintings were pure oil with maybe a bit of liquin mixed in.

The paintings above are oil on tile, the paintings below are gouache on tile.

I eventually sealed the gouache with a thin layer of acrylic gel medium, to give the paintings the shine and apparent body of my oil paintings. I don’t think it’s hard to tell between the gouache and oil paintings, but if I weren’t so versed, it might be a bit hard to tell, because the finish is so similar.

If I layered the gouache too thickly, it would sometimes crack. I assume this is because the gouache can’t really sink into anything, so it forms a layer and loses structure, where gouache is designed to sink into paper and not be thickly layered. Given the cracks, I wasn’t sure how to fix this. I would try to thin out the cracked layer with water application or with another thin layer of paint (probably a bad idea) but it was hard to get those cracks out. Maybe even some particular colors of the gouache I was using cracked more than others. I’m not sure. After seeing the cracking, this is why I figured it would be a good idea to seal the gouache tile paintings in gel medium, which as far as I have seen is pretty much immune to all kinds of cracking and damage.

Another reason that I think we love painting on canvas is that a finished canvas is relatively easy to display. Nobody really frames a tile - tiles are meant to be stepped on, or meant to be put on a wall in large groups.

I found that shadow boxes worked really well to frame and display paintings on tile. I adhere the painting with a removable-but-strong tape strip to the shadow box backing, and let it sit in the box. I really like how this turned out. The glass protects the painting surface from dust and showcases the tile in an elegant way.

To sum up:

• Painting in oil on tile is straightforward and doesn't require priming. The paint sticks well to the tile surface, allowing for impasto-style painting.

• Gouache painting on tile requires priming with clear gesso to improve adhesion. Different types of tiles may need priming as well.

• Shadow boxes are my recommendation for displaying painted tiles, providing protection and an elegant presentation.

Sketchbook Confessional April 2023

Welcome to April 2023’s Sketchbook Confessional - the Sketchbook Confessional is a blog where I review all of the art that I made in a month. Rather than a ‘to-do’ list, the Sketchbook Confessional is a ‘done’ list, where I can objectively see what I made without forgetting or getting too grandiose about it.

In April I started something a bit new - painting in oil on glass. I found some small palm-sized glass samples and thought they would be wonderful to paint on.

Luckily I was right. Funnily enough, some blogs on the internet would have one think that painting oil on glass is a doomed mistake. It worked just fine in my case with these glass samples. I decided with some of the glass samples to make paintings of old mining structures around Leadville.

It always awes me when I am running or skiing up high in Leadville and I happen across some kind of old mining relic. It reminds me how crazed yet methodical people were about mining the earth. First of all, they were at anywhere from 10,000 to 13,000 feet, in the 1800s, digging and exploding and sluicing the earth around. I imagine how hard it is to walk around at 12000 feet and then imagine swinging a sledgehammer or moving rocks around. It’s not exactly the mining scene in Zoolander that plays in my head but, almost? haha.

Anyways, I think all of the wonderful nature aspects of Leadville get a lot of credit and I’ve personally done a lot to credit those wonderful aspects with the mountains in my paintings. Mt. Elbert, waterfalls, animal life, and Leadville flowers are usually my subjects so I figured, why not talk about mining history in my art? It’s not as glamorous a subject and the pollution in Leadville is seen as one of the negative parts of it, but I think it’s better to talk about the whole picture than to pretend the mining aspects of the town and pollution do not exist. After all the entire town probably would not be there without mining - nobody opens an opera house at 10,000 feet for no reason for no customers.

I made around 12 mines total.

I made a few paintings in my Space Cowboy series. Eventually I want to do a bigger one, for now I made a small 4 x 4 inch painting and 3 x 5 inch painting.

I also made it out several times in April for plein air painting, as it’s finally getting a bit nicer out, and there’s this thing called #Pleinairpril that I was able to get excited about.

I’ve been trying out a new rig with a lighter easel and also using a cigar box as a palette. The cigar box works well because it contains the paint and it doesn’t slide around.

It was truly fun and challenging to get out a few times with my baby as well. Plein air with a baby, for me, involves double the planning and gear. It’s really fun and luckily we don’t have to walk too far to find something cool to paint in Boulder.

In April I also tried out using photos of myself as starters for the AI app Prequel. I saw Prequel in an ad and thought it looked interesting, so, I gave it a try.

I gave the ai a few photos of me and used what is called the “Watercolor” AI on the app. I thought this was fascinating as an exercise. I learned a lot about how this particular AI and AI style handles faces or what it thinks is pretty - it definitely grabs highlights on my face and makes them brighter, and makes my eyebrows thicker, darker, and more rounded. Which I don’t think is a bad look, only different. I think the AI’s faces can lean towards looking a bit uncanny or ‘overdone’ in some instances, but not all.

What these remind me of are covers of photoshop and illustrator magazines from about 2009 - present, many of them feature realistic face-bust portraits with, reductively, lines and flowers coming out of people’s heads. Which I don’t think is a bad look. I can’t help but think the AI has trained on covers or illustrations like this. I had a lot of fun with this and it’s something I can do while I’m rocking my baby and I have only one hand free or even 0 hands free at times. It’s more fun - way more fun - than scrolling news sites.

More on my foray into ai swimsuit photos here.

For fun, I made a book of the swimsuit photos and AI photos side by side.

At the end of April, I worked on a bit of paper art involving dragons! It’s been very fun to do this:

Playing:

I took a bit of a break from Gene Wolfe books this month and instead, in my late night hours after my baby goes to sleep, I play Octopath Traveler on Switch. Even before I saw that a sequel was coming out, I was playing it, and then I saw that the sequel was coming out and I figured I should finish and enjoy the first one if I ever got the second one. I also have that thing happening with Gene Wolfe that happened when I played Breath of the Wild - I don’t want it to end, so I stop powering through everything, afraid the thing I love will be over somehow. Of course this is silly and I could just re-read or replay, but that’s how I am, I guess. I leave things that I really love somewhat unfinished.

Octopath and Gene Wolfe are aligned for me because I started both in 2019, put them both down for a long time, then finally got going again. I guess it was hard for me to focus on things like this in 2020 and 2021.

As far as Octopath, I really love this game, it’s pretty to look at and the concept art is cool. I started playing it as Primrose, the dancer, and I empathize with this character quite a bit. I personally think the Allure ability is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in a game, and it’s more than funny because the power of seduction is such a real one. Mostly what each character says after Primrose Allures them is the funny part to me.

I thought the final boss for Primrose was truly scary, along with the finals for H’aanit and Ophelia. I won’t spoil it even though the game is like four years old at this time, haha. I ended up playing most of the game with the four women characters as a party. I like them the most, though I also think the scholar character is really funny and pure.

I also love the merchant, Tressa. Everything she says brings me joy, especially when I charge her up to her ultimate and she says “Welcome Back” and when she finishes a battle “Time to close up shop!” idk why this is so funny and perfect to me but it is. I think Tressa’s story was the first one I finished in the game. The part with the travel journal was so pure to me. There’s a lot of purity in her storyline which is a bit hard to find in stories about money and trade.

My other, unposted silly photos of the game don’t do it much justice. Since I played the original Game Boy growing up and I still remember gray and yellow screens, everything on the Switch looks like some kind of holy relic to me, light and color pouring out of it. Every moment in Octopath is so pretty it’s hard for me to get over. I could really go on and on about this game. I finished the main story and hope to play the sequel soon.

Running:

In April I got a few big run expeditions in. The biggest run I got in was 9 miles, and I started stroller running quite a bit more too. It was exciting to do as we move towards summer. I’m still training for the Leadville Heavy Half but the runs are fun to go on regardless of any goal. It’s fun to see everything around Colorado greening up a bit for spring.