Saguaro Lake

I always feel a brush gives me more options( shape, texture) when doing trees and foliage, if abstraction was the goal here MB you nailed it.

I agree. Brushes add so much more versatility. Lately, I’ve been drawn to the more abstract impressionistic landscape style and I’ve been trying to find the best way to accomplish this. I love the simplicity of using a palette knife even if it means limiting my options — at least in this season of my painting exploration.

I love pallette knife painting. Challenging myself right now working through bob Ross seasons with limited pallette and a pallete knife. I found Merlin enabnit paintings to be a good reference. Got a few of his old books on ebay been hooked ever since.

I was just thinking about trying to do some BR paintings with a knife. Glad to hear you’ve had some success with it! Do you use liquid white as a base when you do that or just paint right onto the canvas?

Liquid white is primarily to enable moving the paint around and blending, with impasto not really needed.

tel, I was thinking that liquid white would be unnecessary for impasto knife painting. With that said, I have been trying to brush a very small amount of undiluted color as a ground, almost just to stain the gesso, but not enough to really blend very easily. I suppose I should let this "ground" dry before starting the impasto work, but I'm impatient when working with these practice pieces.

As impasto is the laying on of thickly applied paint i'm not sure what benefits will be gained by underpainting

I’ve read that many impressionists like to use a middle-toned, colored ground so that they can better evaluate values. I can’t say that I see a drastic difference by using a colored ground, but I do find that it makes some difference. She passed away a few years ago, but I’ve been really drawn to the work of Caroline Jasper and she did an impasto style on bright red grounds.