Tangerine dream

12 x 9 inches, oil on Gatorfoam panel
SOLD to Ryan Gallery Las Vegas

I did a smaller version of this about a year back without the knife (which is on the cover of the Blick catalogue this year) and just wanted to enjoy painting a tangerine again but using walnut oil this time.
I have started buying unrefined walnut oil from my local supermarket and 'washing' it myself to clean it.
You do that by putting distilled water and walnut oil (50/50) in a clean glass jar, give it a shake and leave it to stand in the sun for about three days. The water pulls the impurities out of the oil and so you are left with oil at the top, mucilage (the impurities) in the middle and the water at the bottom.
Then I carefully extract the oil into another clean glass jar with a pipette leaving behind the mucilage and water to throw away. I then leave the oil in the sun for a further 3/4 days (with the top not on too tight to let a little air in) which lightens the colour quite a lot.
if it was good enough for Da Vinci, it's good enough for me ;-)

Apparently, walnut does not yellow as much as linseed and my next step is to press my own oil from the millions of walnuts cluttering the garden each year.
I still add cobalt drier to speed up the drying time as walnut takes longer to dry than linseed.