Airn LeBus

I started this blog because I have been painting a lot since discovering oils and want to share my art and the process and maybe some tips about painting that I learn as I go along (for other beginners). The focus is primarily on oil painting, but I might post some digital art or watercolors occasionally. I have other stuff like stained glass and watercolor illustrations on my other sites (see below).

With oil painting, I am still trying to figure out the medium so I’m focusing mostly on learning the technical basics at this point. I am self-taught and was not serious about art until the past couple of years…I made stained glass for a while, then was focusing on drawing and watercolors, then started painting with Acrylic in October of 2007 and switched mostly to oil painting in February 2008. With the discovery of oils vs. acrylics and some early successes, I started painting almost every day and have been very excited about it. My attempts with acrylics encountered limited success — I have found oil painting to be by far my favorite method of artistic expression. I learn something new almost every time I paint, and the results have been much better than any other art form I have tried (except maybe stained glass, which yields nice results right away but is too tedious for me I think)

I think it will be fun to share work-in-progress photos, especially since some paintings go through some major revisions and it’s cool to see the various stages and such.

- Airn

P.S. You can find me on MySpace (I’ve got a bunch of art up there too) at myspace.com/airnlebus and I have another site with stained glass i made, my music, and etc at spectralcreations.com and another blog called Dark and Creepy for letting you all know about especially cool dark and creepiness. I also have a little nook over at Deviantart.

P.P.S. About the name — Chromatic Black is a black-like color made from two complimentary colors, such as an earth tone and a blue…you could use Raw Umber and French Ultramarine in pretty much equal parts to make a chromatic black. I like the name cuz it sounds like an oxymoron - chromatic means “Relating to colors or color”… colorful black.