I've been working on several paintings lately - one is a heavily-worked oil, or heavily worked by my standards anyway. As a relief from it - such is the detail I was getting spots before the eyes - I took an ancient painting knife (I've not bought a new one for around 35 years) and larded paint on to a fresh canvas. Complete bliss! And I've discovered that my penny-pinching objection to painting with knives is actually complete rubbish. I'd convinced myself that you had to use far more paint with knives than with brushes: what I'd forgotten was that you use ALL the paint on your palette - you sweep it clean with the knife and apply it without medium and even without much mixing. So I ended up with an easy to clean palette, fewer colours by far than I would normally have used, and no more of any given colour, even white, than I'd have used with brushes. Not only that but the clean up afterwards was so much easier.... So I'll certainly be doing that again ... not sure about the result, mind... I shall post it. Back to my other oil - which I'll also post when I've finally finished with it - I wanted to recreate the rather crusty look of paintings I saw many years ago, the kind of intricate working of branches and trees amongst leaves; and I wanted detail without clinical precision. And, fair reader, you will either like it or loathe it... One result of the method is a certain confusion of colour and tone in places, which needed to be rectified with glazes. I've tried all sorts of recipes for glazes - Liquin, which does for most things quite satisfactorily; various glaze and gel mediums produced by Winsor and Newton and Daler Rowney; half Linseed oil and turps; one third Linseed, turps, and dammar varnish; stand oil .... they all have their strengths. Concerned by cracking of the paint film, I have to add richer oil as the painting progresses ...and I'm not sure at all that one of the best glazes I've ever used isn't just plain Linseed oil, on its tod.... It has a lot more flow than most - it tends to be cleaner and not to discolour over time (has to be used thinly), and it's easier than the thixotropic mediums to brush out smoothly. But ever anxious to nick others' ideas and working practices, I wonder what fellow oil painters use, and whether you think using plain Linseed is a bit of a risk? No prizes for the answer, but it'd be interesting to hear from you.