A Painting A Day

I haven't posted for a few days. I am going to try to catch up. I got some miniature boards from the art store and did this painting tonight from a picture we took in Provence on our honeymoon. Our wedding anniversary is today (May 28th) so I thought it would be a fun way to celebrate.



I do really like the way the blue makes the background recede. I improvised the colors, as I tend to always do.  The roofs were not that red, the hills were not that blue. I like bright colors, so I guess I was just trying to get lots of color in.  On the greens, I find myself never using green out of the tube. I have several different colors of green, (like sap green and vermillon) but none of them seem quite right for nature. So most of the time I end up doing a mixture of ultramarine blue and lemon yellow for my trees and grasses. Then I use almost straight blue for the darker greens and straight yellow for the highlights.

To dig a little deeper into color - here's what I use in my palette (in the order of which I use the most) : Titanium White, Lemon Yellow, Cadmium Red, Cadmium Yellow, Ultramarine blue, Crimson Alizarin, Yellow Ochre, and then Lamp Black. I have these other colors in my palette that I rarely use:  Sap Green, Raw Sienna, Cerulean Blue, and Viridian (which is a type of emerald green). Just recently I bought Burnt Umber and I'm anticipating using that a lot.  I find that I use two or three times as much of the lighter colors than I do the darker colors. I use tons of white, and a good bit of the lemon yellow, while only a speck of lamp black and ultramarine blue go a long way.

I have a very good book on color that I refer to a lot. It's called Color Mixing Recipes by William F. Powell. The book is very straightforward. It has a bit of color theory in the beginning, and then it has color recipes. It shows a swatch of the color and then shows you how many parts of each color you need to add to achieve the desired result. I have found it indispensable to my painting.

It's funny that I read these are all the colors you need in your palette:

You need 3 primary colors in two hues, one cool, and one warm.

Reds

Yellows

Blues

Looking at this, and at my colors in my palette, I see I really need cobalt blue. I thought it was close to the cerulean, but I think it's a deeper blue than the cerulean. I'll try to pick some up this week.

On my technique, I was just too impatient throughout the painting. That made my work sloppy and amateurish. Again I am trying to put too much detail. I wanted to do the painting looser, with more impressions than detail. Now that I look at it, I see so much more that needs to be changed.

It was interesting working on such a small board and doing a miniature. The board was 6 x 8 and to me, that's just tiny!