Preparing the Wood and the Strokes

Seal and base-coat

Fossum’s method: seal the wood with shellac, sealer, or varnish; sand lightly; wipe it clean; then paint one, two, or more coats of the background color. Red and green were the common old backgrounds ¹; Os grounds are often black or white, sometimes red. Use a dark acrylic for the ground, sanding lightly between coats, as North House does for its practice boards ². Paint the practice board at the same time.

Mix the palette

Squeeze out the colors and mix the tints you’ll need with the palette knife. Fossum mixes burnt umber and burnt sienna into red for the “old rosemaling rusty reds” ¹. Thin the paint with a little medium: North House’s Os class uses walnut alkyd medium ³. For transparent Telemark the paint should be “thin enough to see through” ⁴.

The strokes

Vesterheim’s fundamentals class teaches brush control, paint consistency, and “the flowing C- and S-strokes, teardrops, scrolls, and leaves” ⁵. Fill the practice board:

• C-stroke: load the brush, set it down and press to spread the hairs, then pull it around the curve, lifting gradually until only the tip touches, ending in a fine tail.
• S-stroke: start on the tip, press through the middle of the curve, and lift again as the curve reverses.
• Teardrop or comma: press, then lift as you pull away: a fat head and a thin tail.
• Scrolls: chains of C-strokes, each springing from the last.
• Liner work: with a long liner brush and thinned paint, pull fine lines and tendrils in one motion.

Make rows of each until they come out alike. American Telemark painters work wet-on-wet with “whiplash movements of the brush” ⁴.

Try it

Fill one row of the board with twenty C-strokes the same size, all curving the same way, then a row curving the other way. The reverse direction is always harder; practice it until the two rows match.