The first day of underpainting my picture for the Tabernacle competition, the theme is the end of a Welsh poem called Ode to Summer. Part of it involved a painting, so I took the unusual step of making a computer model of a picture frame, thinking that it would make the underlying forms more obvious and the shading simpler than using a real picture frame. Then I decided to add some "reflections" to make it more golden.
That was a mistake because although it looks fine as a computer model, it doesn't look like a real picture frame. Painting it is laborious and unrealistic! So, today I spent about three tedious painting, then unpainting a shape that doesn't look very good in the end anyway. Lesson learned then. That must be a painting lesson number in the two-hundreds!
