A busy day, still enthused about painting but unable to charge into it as it's a music rehearsal day tomorrow. I started by making a lighting model, and painting a colour study for the new 'Ethics' painting. I also took some reference photos of flowers for the Shakespeare drawing.
All of this took quite a few hours. Then I decided to add a new glaze layer to Self Portrait as Tripod, which I wasn't quite happy with... the sky was too bland, yellow and grey, when it needed more drama, more darkness, and more variety to the hue. Glazing was time consuming and slow, partly because I don't like to glaze with opaque colours - this defeats the beauty and point of glazing, but it makes darkening and smoothing more difficult, generally, this needs more layers.
I used Michael Harding's Burnt Sienna here, almost an identical hue to Blockx Mars Yellow Orange, though the latter is fantastically powerful and opaque and the former so very weak. I now recall that Raw Sienna is also fantastically weak, to the point of being pointless, not so much transparent as severely lacking in power of any sort. The Harding Sienna was frustrating, so I mixed a similar hue with cadmium lemon (Cadmium Yellow Pale in Blockx, this is actually a very primary yellow, called lemon in most ranges) and benzimidazolone maroon. I tend to favour Blockx Primary Yellow, also benzimidazolone, because it's almost identical to the cadmium in tone and usage, but more permanent and less toxic. Today, I just felt like a change. This new orange was far more powerful and better in every way.
For the darker parts of sky I used Ultramarine Violet, also a supra-delicate colour, but I can forgive it in this lovely hue, the most beautiful of all colours. It did mean that the upper sky is a little transparent. I might have to add yet another layer here.
I want to paint more - need to! But events feel in the way. I'll complete our rehearsal tomorrow, and try to work on the paintings in progress next week.
