Friday 31 January 2014

Still Here

Has it really been over a month since I posted.  I have been busy and painting but I have been struggling and haven't painted anything that I thought was worth posting.  I have been overworking everything and producing lots of mud.

I decided, this week, to shake things up a bit by changing up my palette. I did some research on the Cyan-Magenta-Yellow colour wheel and decided to play with it.  Having grown up with Red, Yellow and Blue as the primary colours I refused to believe that you could mix red from two other colours but guess what?  Magenta and a little yellow do indeed make red.  I also discovered that the new colours were all transparent so it was almost impossible to get mud.

This portrait was painted using only hansa yellow, phthalo blue, quin. magenta and white on a board toned with transparent iron oxide.  It is terrible because I spent more time scrubbing off than painting on and I used far too much white but it was fun and I learned a lot.  It will take some practice to get good blues by mixing cyan and magenta and good reds with yellow and magenta.  I will add reds and blues to my palette but I want to play with the very limited palette until I get to know them.  I may even go back to my original palette.  Who knows.

I also took my solo show at St James Anglican Church down this week.  Debbie is happy because some of her favourite paintings have returned home to our walls.  I ended up selling eight paintings so it was, in my opinion very successful.