So very tired last night, I crawled into bed at 9:30 and was asleep by 10pm. I woke up in a sweat, from a nightmare, at 5am or so. I took my temperature and it was an unusually low 36.1 degrees. I think this is a slow-down response to the sports-car busyness of my past few days.
I rose early and decided to paint The Fictitious Secret History of Aspartame.
The canvas was prepared with an ultramarine tone. I prefer an acrylic toning now, rather than an oil imprimatura; it's more reliable from a sketch stability point of view and faster and easier to apply. Here is the original concept:
I had no real ideas for colours at first, but by today I was more sure that the background should be sky-blue with grey storms behind the child. The planning bounced between ideas, from a stormy right and blue left, to the opposite. In the end I thought that the rainbow and cloud on the left near the child represented hope and positivity, with the stormy pantomime (and amusing) villain of Aspartame on the right, so I made 'his' area dark. This was my first painting with my new paint box, and several fresh paints, so I chose a mix of colours, trying to use a few neglected hues to struggle away from routines and into a more exciting, experimental area. I chose cobalt blue for the sky, which worked perfectly on the strongly blue toned canvas.
Oranges and yellows were used, and faded to dark brown-blacks. The pink cloud used light red and Naples yellow, although some yellow ochre was mixed too and used in some areas like the baby.
I was unsure whether to include the fine lines in the underpainting or save these for glazing. The finest lines are best glazed, but everything is, generally, best underpainted; this is a real borderline area. These can be glazed over and still seen beneath, allowing the line to be painted over relatively easily... generally it is better, in quality terms, to underpaint everything and glaze everything. In the end I did paint these and I made the lines relatively thick, about 1mm.
One curiosity is that the cloud shape is lightning shaped, like the second cloud (Aspartame's eyebrow on our left). I wondered about painting these as lightning or not... they also have the aspect of the finger, the touch of death or Zeus... mirroring the hands of Aspartame.
