A Painting A Day

Ah, the illusive brown egg shell! I tried the color recipe suggested to me by http://yeshuaschildart.wordpress.com/ and that was the correct base color. As I looked at the egg shell more, I used a pinkish mauve tone of that color in the mid range and more yellow in the light range. I think the egg shell has been eluding me because I think it has multiple colors in it. Perhaps that's because of the light from within? But overall I am much happier with the way this color turned out. ;)

It was surprisingly challenging to do this painting. The shape of the plate was particularly difficult and the color of the eggshells still eludes me. I wish some of these daily painters would post their color recipe for brown egg shells! If I get it right, I will post it.

Today is also a milestone in my painting a day journey, today marks the 20th day in a row that I've done a painting. Yay! I'm very proud of myself for sticking to it.

Yay! Got a painting done today. The picture is really dark - I couldn't take a good picture of it. I keep meaning to look up how to take better pictures. These are what I believe are mirasol peppers. They are HOT! Put some in gumbo yesterday. I used surprisingly few brush strokes on this and didn't try to do detail at all.  

So color class today! It was freezing in the old church where the class was held. Important things learned today were: On Compliments (what you use to get shadow) The compliment of any primary is the mixing of the other two primaries. That may require a little explanation. If you have red - and you want to get the shadow color and you don't know what the compliment of red is - just mix the other two primaries together (blue and yellow) and there you have it - the compliment of red is green. The compliment of a secondary color is the primary color left out. To explain that further - secondary colors are green, violet and orange. If you want the secondary of say orange, you know that you mixed red and yellow together to get that color, so the primary that is left out is blue. So the compliment of orange is blue. Puttitng it that way - breaking it down into very simplistic terms is extremely beneficial to me. Now I won't have to carry around my color wheel all the time! We didn't paint a painting in class today - instead we practiced mixing colors. So I did this rather quickly when I got home to have something for today. I'm not very impressed with it, but a little orange does warm up a cold day. Ha!

I was worried I might not have time to paint today. So glad I made it! Yesterdays pears came to an untimely demise. The canvas literally snapped in half! I tried to put it back together, but it just wasn't going to happen. So my lovely little painting is going to decorate a landfill somewhere. :( I am using really cheap canvas boards so I guess when I run out of these I might spend a little more than .47 per canvas. Ha! I could use some better brushes too. I guess now that I am getting serious about it, I should invest in good materials. So since my pears from yesterday are gone, I had to revisit the subject. I tried again, and this time I finally got around to putting something other than white under my glass sheet that I use for a palette. The color is an off white. I do think it helped me when mixing to have a different color under the glass. Tomorrow is color class! So excited! One thing that's funny is that every single one of these paintings I've done lately is on the same black countertop... and looking at the paintings not one of them has the same color background! I imagine it would be boring to have the same background on every painting, but I would much rather it be intentional!

Not a lot of time today to work on this, but overall am happy with the colors. I think I was a little afraid to really put the highlight on the onion though, so I held back! Ha!