Colleen Barry NYC Artist

Making a Quick Color Gradient

Making a Quick Color Gradient:

Before I start painting, I make a quick general color gradient curated for the area I’m about to paint. If it’s a green section, I mix a green gradient scale; if it’s yellowish, I make a yellow gradient and so on….If I don’t yet know what the color will be becaus...

The Hotline September 2025

Will and I take questions from callers direct from the studio. We hope to do this frequently and with artists guests coming soon! Enjoy!

Making Studies

A little bit about making oil studies. Why I use them and what they’re good for:

1. They’re small, usually quick to make, not intimidating in scale.

2. Exploratory and curious, because they don’t take long, the handling is more free and arbitrary, which often leads to surprising discoveries.

   2025-09-23 17:39:39 +0000 UTC View Post

Out-takes from Love Dogs / 2023-2024

Back in 2023, I documented the making of a painting called Love Dogs. Created for an art fair in Brussels, Belgium, I shared every stage of the process in video format, taking viewers along as I explored the painting—even while figuring out what it truly meant. From the initial doodles and poster studies, to priming the can...

Mothers in the Arts : Strength, creativity, and survival tips for artist-mothers

7 Guides for Strength and Mental Well-Being for the Artist-Mother

1. Begin with gratitude.

Know deeply and truly how blessed you are to be a mother in the first place. Let that awareness be your foundation. Yes, it’s overwhelming at times, and it can feel as if the weight of the...

Gradients and Grisaille

The Grisaille process begins with value tiling on the palette, placing down discrete blocks of tone from a prepared value scale. These tiles serve as structural anchors, preventing the painting from becoming vague in its early stages. Just as important is the immediate breaking through of the picture plane: the values are arr...

More on Oil Transfer

I don’t use a projector when I make my transfers. My go-to method is the oil transfer, where I print out cartoons, sometimes small, sometimes very large, and coat the back with oil paint before transferring them. For large works, the paper often has to be cut into sections since a single sheet won’t fit through a standard...

Process for “LIGHT MY SKY” 2023

I felt it was appropriate, as I fired up a Substack this morning about women, self-portraiture, narcissism in our culture, and what it means to paint the other. While searching for depictions of some of my favorite mother images from early 20th-century photographs of Indigenous women with their children, I stumbled u...

Making an Oil Transfer

The Oil Transfer: Artists have long used transfer methods to move drawings onto their working surface, whether in fresco, where cartoons were pounced or pressed, or on canvas, where variations of tracing and rubbing were common. Every painter has their own approach. In this case, I’m using an oil transfer: ...

Art Review: 3 Female Voices 9-5-25

After two days of seeing shows across the city, I was struck by how relieved I felt whenever I encountered female made painting that hadn’t absorbed Francis Bacon’s shadow. His legacy of arbitrary chaos rarely opens toward light, it almost always drags downward into something destructive.

At the Ambera Well...

Notes on an Ébauche

The Ébauche - literally “first attempt” in French - is the initial painted layer. When you begin, I recommend using a small round brush; I often use a Rosemary sable round. I like to hatch with the paint almost as if I’m drawing, laying in the shadows with a base shadow value and then gradually creeping up into the mid...

Stages of a Portrait circa 2019

Back in 2019, I was painting a lot of portraits, and this commission came out of that period. At the time, I was looking closely at late 19th-century painters—Abbott Thayer and John Singer Sargent in particular. My process was essentially two layers: first, I laid down an opaque, desaturated underpainting, almost like a dea...

Part 2: Shellacing Paper

Proportion: 1 Part Shellac Flakes / 6 parts Denatured Alcohol

Apply: Window Shade the shellac mixture one area at a time, left to right or reverse

Why Shellac Paper? It makes the paper more durable, its enriches the tones of the graphite giving it a beautiful dept...

The Andy Warhol Effect

A little excerpt from my Love Dogs painting video documented in 2023 and released in March, 2024. I documented the entire process of making a figure painting from the original doodle, the canvas prep, the underpainting, to the final finish and presentation at Art Brussels Contemporary Art Fair...

The Importance of Pre-Mixing

On an August afternoon, a little description about the importance of pre- mixing. Make it a ritual.

Don’t chase : Summon / 6 Essential Rules for Building a Career in Art

1. Don’t chase - summon.

Desperation has a scent, and dealers can smell it. Instead of running after opportunities, calmly go about your work. Make paintings that hold their ground and understand the landscape you’re operating in. Draw the right people into your orbit. Chasing never works—there’...

On Returning to Drawing…..

I’ve recently returned to drawing after a seven year sabbatical, and here are some thoughts.

Drawing is a beast you feed, but it is never satisfied. It’s like the gym, you never leave thinking, that was my best workout, i’ve mastered it. Instead, it’s always improvement without arrival. Drawing works t...

Toning Paper : Part 1

Paper: Arches Water color paper 140 lb, hot press.

Tone: Sennelier Ink Walnut Stain mix with Water (2 tbs water, 2 or 3 syringes of ink) per piece.

Apply: Window shade the ink mixture onto the paper working left to right, do not start in ...

A new Ébauche: Tronie/Janus

For this new 11 x 14 panel, I’m layering a modern tronie of a popstar over the form of an ancient Janus bust. Janus is a Roman god, (he doesn’t have a Greek counterpart), and is always shown with two faces. He looks both backward and forward, keeper of thresholds, patron of beginnings and endings, presiding over every pas...

Speaking Through the Ground

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about ground color—and how the ground collaborates with the layers that come after it. It’s simple in my mind: if my ground is cool, I put a warm layer on top; if my ground is warm, I go with a cooler sub-layer.

When I’m doing studies, I suggest to any painter: make oil ske...

Glazing Ears / African Painted Dog - 2025

I’m applying the second pass on this African wild dog (also known as the painted dog). The underpainting—done in a mix of raw umber, white, and yellow—is now completely dry. My job at this stage is to create a thin film of color over it, working with opaque passages of Yellow Ochre, Indian yellow and Van Dyke brown. In ...

Approaches to Underpainting

Underpainting is the foundational stage of a painting, setting up structure, value, and harmony before the final layers of color are applied. Throughout history, artists have developed a variety of approaches, each with its own character and purpose. Below are four key methods, with examples of their historical use: (Quick di...

Girl with Wild Dogs / 2025

(Wait till the end to see my palette) My neutral ground is a bit darker on this one. A value 4.5. I did this intentionally so that my single layer of paint sits easier and allows for one pass. At the very end I may glaze a bit but this is a "one pass painting". Again, I reiterate that lighter grounds require more covering, 2025-08-16 13:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post

I’ve Returned to Drawing

So I’ve Returned to Drawing….

After what I’d call a seven-year sabbatical from making formal drawings, drawings for their own sake, I’m returning to that language again. Of course, I’ve never truly stopped drawing. Every painting begins with it; it’s inevitable. But the deliberate act of making a Drawing as ...

My Studio Library

I really believe books, and the images in them, have a kind of quiet power for an artist. When I’m working on a painting, there’s usually a specific idea in my mind—often shaped by certain artists I’ve been looking at. Books carry an aura, and I think that aura seeps into the work in ways we don’t even notice. One o...

The Long Game: 7 Principles for the Working Artist

1. Master Your Craft

Dedicate serious time—ideally in an incubator or school setting—to build your technical skill and visual language; for me, that meant 10,000 hours over ten years.

2. Build Community

Stay socially connected with supportive peers—through school, arti...

Rules for Glazing

The rules for glazing are actually pretty simple.

1. If you start with a cooler, more opaque underpainting, you can glaze warmer and darker over it.

2. If your underpainting is warm and dark, you can scumble cooler and lighter on top.

When you glaze with darker paint, it tends to warm things up. When you ...

Process “Win, Win” 2022 Spring Break Art Show

I made a painting entitled “Win, Win” back in 2022 for the Spring Break Art Show. Similar to The Feet Washers I painted these figures on an illuminated warm ground. What’s tricky about this system is that the transfer lines are quite apparent and covering them takes some finessing. Some areas required ...

Fever Dream- First Pass on Face -2025 GOOD MUD

Here is a sneak peak into my process of tiling freshly mixed opaque oil paint masses onto a neutral ground base and imprematura (Italian for "first coat"). This approach allows for one pass of paint and minimal going back and retouching. Notice how I lay the paint in flat blocks and then hatch them together almost like sewing...

Michelangelo’s Models

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=30890347228

Michelangelo’s Models – Formerly in the Paul von Praun Collection

LeBrooy, Paul James – Published by Creelman & Drummond P...