Glazing 'The Blood Of Winter' this afternoon. I rarely enjoy glazing and never look forward to its chore. It always improves a painting but it feels like I've already done the bulk of the creativity. Here you can see the underpainting and glazed result, though you'll never appreciate the subtlety of the layering in a digital photo. The shadows are grey in the underpainting but have blues and greens in the glaze. The glazes are very thinly rubbed on, delicately affecting the colour. If glazing with the same colours, the result is simply smoothing the underpainting, not special. A principle is to glaze warm colours over cold and vice versa, but in general we're adding colour itself, new colours, more variation and more intensity than on the underpainting.
Half of the day was taken up with preparation of some watercolours for Knutsford and helping my father with his stamp collection. I listened to Queen's The Works for the first time today too, a good album. I must aim to write my songs more with Freddie's voice in mind as it's a range that works for me. In the past I've been too limited, I was growing in voice and still very much am. The songs which use these higher notes sound better now, or will sound better if and when I re-record them.
One of my early songs, inspired by Queen's 'We Are The Champions' and from 2003, is called 'I Won In The End'. It feels too self-triumphal to sing, too reminiscent of 'Tomorrow Belongs To Me' from Cabaret. Last night I thought that it could be simply changed to 'You Won In The End', making it instead a tribute song.
