A night of stomach cramps and sleeplessness, slept only 3 hours or so, so woke late and in poor condition for painting. Still, painting needed to be done so I got to work on Songs of Saint George. Here is today's work, without the harp strings:
The original idea, in my mind, was simply light grey with a black cross, but I thought some morose colours would help. I rarely use greens, so I decided to experiment a little. I painted two colour studies yesterday, changing both. The second version had yellow-ish or pink-ish flesh tones for the 'floor' object and a green cape for the figure, but a green floor seemed best.
Painting today was very slow and arduous, perhaps due to my tiredness and inability to eat or drink optimally. There are few colours, cobalt turquoise green and Harding's Naples Yellow (titanium antinomy chromium oxide) are the main colours. At this point my plan was to leave it and add the harp strings during a glazing phase, but I was undecided whether to glaze at all; many of the fine details here are extremely fine and complete.
Would the ultra-fine harp lines be finer in a glaze? Usually, yes, but perhaps not certainly... one advantage of adding them now is that the background colours can be used to block in around them, making them finer... matching those colours later might be difficult.
I was genuinely unsure about whether to add the harp lines now or later. For the Aspartame painting, I added the spirals for the eyes during underpainting and those worked well. The finest eyelashes and eyebrows in a portrait I tend to add during glazing only.
I started painting at 09:30 and finished at 19:30 after a day of irregular breaks of around 20 mins each, less than normal. This painting was very time consuming and arduous, despite having relatively little detail.
It was fun to paint details on this knight, however:
I paid homage to Bosche's original by including the relief of the spur.
