It's below freezing today so we're painting inside the car and I'm using the steering
wheel attachment to hold the painting on. That attachment is handy for rainy
days or or for anything where you have to paint from inside the car.
There's five reasons why sometimes you need to paint from your car. Either it's snowing,
or it's raining, or it's just too cold out, or you need a viewpoint from where your car is parked,
or it's just not safe to go outside. So that's why I wanted to figure out how I could make my
easel attach to the steering wheel without falling off. What I made was a steering wheel attachment
which fits directly on to the top of the gripper of your sketch easel and then that goes directly
on to the steering wheel and gives you a nice secure mount. Let me show you the build. This
is a piece of 3/4 inch pine. The inside arc is cut to the curvature of the steering wheel and
I have two spacer pieces which open up a gap that will fit around my gripper. The cap piece is glued
on to the spacers and the whole thing fits right over the gripper. And it's tightened down with a
thumb screw. I want it to be nice and smooth so I use a vertical belt sander but you're gonna use a
sanding block and a piece of sandpaper and that gets all of the protruding sharp corner smoothed
down. Now the slot is cut to a 5/16 diameter that fits over the bolt and the t nut which holds the
gripper together and I cut that other slot on the other side so that I could turn the whole thing
over and I discovered this works really well as feet to support the back of the easel if I want
to work in a tabletop mode now to finish it I use tung oil finish which goes on quite easily with
a rag and this is all the finish you need if it's well sanded it'll have a good feel to it.
now one thing I had to add to this were these little extensions here that curve out and those
just help to hold it on to the steering wheel better otherwise I had a tendency to slip off
that's real stable and secure so everything's hanging for the steering wheel here and I've
got all the paints and everything I need right next to the painting and even though
it's below freezing outside we were able to get a little gouache painting inside the comforts
of our car I'm using a sketchbook primed with casein to give me a base to work over
this house is across the street surrounded by snow I do pretty careful pencil drawing on the
dry priming using two vanishing points and a ruler to help me do a grid for the perspective
once I work out the perspective drawing I can put out my paint this is wash cadmium yellow
magenta Rowney blue just three colors and white these colors make a pretty strong purple which
I have to neutralize with yellow otherwise it's just way too strong but all I really want to do
at this stage is put in some darks around the house using a half inch synthetic brush I need
to knock down that orange a little a little bit there with some bluish colors and I can
come in with some whites in a minute now the shadow side of the house it's a warm clobbered
it's not totally grey but I'll get the orange coming through this kind of milky white cool
gray and I'm really eager to do the the snow now and I'll start with a shadow value here
the opacity of the gouache is covering that casein under painting and then the brighter
white where it's lit by the Sun this house is kind of hemmed in by those rocks the big tall
wall of rock it juts up behind it it's been added to a few times you can see from the dormer on the
back and it's also hemmed in on the front by the highway itself of course but also by the wires
the light comes and goes as I work as the Sun goes behind clouds and some of
the snow is melting off the roof so we're starting to see the shingles underneath
that snow they parked a minivan next to the house while I've been sitting here there's
the heat tape the zig zag on the edge of the roof melting the snow off of it
and I mix up some more white
and I want to just get that sky color coming through the trees so I'm lightly dry brushing
over the top of that gray gouache just to get some random light values
we've closed in the front porch but still it must
be really noisy living in that house with the cars going by and
then the collaborates takes a steady hand to do these
and then the relatively white color of the edges along the window and I'm dry brushing
some of the bushes and things around the house I love that snow pile in the
foreground it really adds a lot of foreground interest that's it about two hours altogether
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