Under The Surface

I made good progress on the second Petra painting, but I realized that in between all the cookie baking, snow shoveling, and other holiday commitments, I didn't enter a blog last week! Hopefully, everyone else has been just as busy and didn't notice.

I am coming near completion of this painting, and I feel like the color balance is much better. I had a friend comment that it must be just like paint by number once you get the black and white values in place. It might seem that way, but I still had to make a lot of choices to get the right colors. I tried an idea I read about recently where you cut a small square out of a white piece of paper and look through the square to really see the color you are looking at. This was especially helpful on the ground color because last time I kept seeing it as too brown and didn't get enough gray, blue and green.

The black and white underpainting does help a bunch for placement and it is kind of magical how all the colors seem to have the right value now and don't seem so overly bright and unnatural. Eventually, I may learn to do this by mixing the colors with enough black in the first place, but for now, I am really glad to have a tool that I know will work.

Some positive results from my fixation with painting cats is that I may have two more commissions from other folks who love their feline friends. I am delighted with the opportunity to keep on learning and provide people with something they will enjoy.

Jeff's Corner: You should see my paint-by-number Mark Rothko...