Mixing up warm and cool strings of greens for my limes.

My plan is to experiment more with broken color, so I have attempted arranged the strings so that adjacent colors have the same value. The warm string uses Sap Green and Cadmium Yellow Light. The cool string is based on Viridian and Cadmium Yellow Light, with a bit of French Ultramarine added to the darkest step.

This black and white photo shows that I was able to match the values pretty well in most of the steps, although the three steps above the darkest level could use some work.

I painted a lemon this evening for my 8″ x 8″ piece for the Maple Valley Arts show. The painting itself went quickly and was much easier than painting front-lighted oranges which require very delicate gradations in the light.

I tried to match the value of the shadows in the lemon with the value of the adjacent blue shadow. They look pretty close now, so my next step will be to soften the edge between the two regions, while bringing some of the blue into the yellow. I will do this after painting the lime so that I can better judge how much “lime” light will bleed into the shadow on the lemon.

The bulk of my evening was spent mixing a string of nine yellows. The string is based primarily on a mixture of Cadmium Yellow Medium, desaturated and darkened with a blend of Quinacridone Magenta and French Ultramarine. The values above pure Cadmium Yellow Medium were lightened with a mixture of Titanium White and Cadmium Yellow Light, which is might lighter than Cadmium Yellow Medium. I did need to offset the cool greenishness of the Cadmium Yellow Light with just a smidgen of Quinacridone Magenta. The dark end of the scale is based mostly on a mixture of Burnt Umber and French Ultramarine.

Today Gary demonstrated glazing on one of my Minneola paintings. He felt that the table top was too blue and that the reflections were too bright, so he simultaneously shifted the hue, lowered the saturation, and darkened with a glaze of Sap Green and Burnt Sienna, thinned with linseed oil. Check out the before-and-after:

8″ x 8″ painting before adding the glaze.

After applying a glaze of Sap Green and Burnt Sienna.

Is it a Mondrian or a Calder? Actually neither. I painted this backdrop to incorporate in a still life tableau with transparent glass containers filled with water. I’m hoping that the colors in the backdrop will make interesting shapes and patterns when viewed through the water. Once the paint dries, I will remove the masking tape and then add black pinstripe borders to each of the colored shapes.

Two down, one more to go!

Here’s the background for my 8″ x 8″ Lemons and Limes painting. I’m going to practice painting the fruit on this painting before moving to my 9″ x 12″ version.

I just finished this 8″ x 8″ painting for the Maple Valley Arts Ten-Twenty-Forty show.