Here’s a new watercolor based on a photo I took while driving along Massachusetts Avenue in DC a couple of years ago. It captures part of our capital’s essence. Painting it was an imperative.
I used a limited palette of 2 reds, 2 blues, and 2 yellows, plus black.
With my painting buddies, the Seven Palettes, I was to mount an exhibition a year ago at Oasis Gallery, Westfield Montgomery Mall, Bethesda, MD. Covid killed that so we got to work and ‘hung’ a digital exhibit online. Here’s one of the gouache paintings I had done for that show. It’s a bit too literal, but I figured some mother or grandmother might like it!
My 3-year old granddaughter and I were painting together during a recent sleepover. She was very engrossed in her art, studiously dragging her wet brush through EVERY block of color before applying the resulting ‘mud’ to her paper. Rather than fret about the growing mess on the palette I decided to paint a quick sketch of her as I looked down on her efforts. Did another quickie the following day from a different angle; different clothes made her look older. . . .
Bernie Dellario tasked our zoom-based art group with painting a fairly complicated scene using only a palette knife. The idea was to force ourselves to simplify. I selected a photo that I’d taken at a Nats night game, courtesy of friends Doug and Toni. I loved the vibrant colors, the dramatic lighting, the sharp green grass, the movement of the crowd and vendors. . . .
Here’s the painting and references. A note for composition buffs: For a bit of extra drama and clarity, I combined positions of orange hands from the two photos. I also omitted the wonderful yellow foul marker because it would been too much for a small square painting. . . . Maybe I’ll do a larger version some time so I can add that color into the mix.
While on a trek to visit a tobacco farm in Cuba some years ago, I spied this diminutive lady trudging down the dusty road, clutching a load of huge tubers. I snapped a quick photo of her as she moved away and finally got around to painting her as homework for my watercolor class with Ed Praybe. Sweet memory.
Here’s a quick watercolor done on some super soft and absorbent handmade paper I had laying around. It’s based on a photo of some darling little girls dancing at their school’s holiday production. It only took a couple of minutes and it was a ton of fun!
In the most recent session with Bernie Dellario, my ‘7 Palettes’ buddies, sister Ceci and a few other folks, we made speedy, simplified interpretations of several Old Master paintings. With a limited palette of the 3 primary colors and about 20-30 minutes each, I painted these images :
A figurative, after the nude Venus of Urbino, painted by Titian (1538); a floral, after a magnificent bouquet by van Veerendael (1662); and a quick gouache study of Madonna and Child, after a beautiful one by Bellini (1510).
Painters have a wide variety of ‘tube colors’ to use in trying to achieve their desired hues. I’ve got 30 or 40 tubes of almost every color you can imagine, most of them untouched. For quite awhile, I’ve opted to limit the number of tubes I use, challenging myself to mix a broad variety of colors from a handful of basic hues. Painters call this a ‘limited palette’. It lightens the load of what you have to carry around with you and it helps give a unity of color to your painting. Nice attributes.
There’s no specified set of colors for a limited palette. In the past, I’ve typically used a ‘split primary’ group, which includes two versions of each primary color, plus white and maybe black. Each of the two selected primaries ‘bends’ toward a different adjacent secondary color. For instance, cadmium red tends toward orange (yellow), while alizarin crimson tends toward a purple (blue). Blues may include phtalo or cerulean blue which tend toward green (yellow) and ultramarine blue which leans toward purple (red). Split yellows might include cadmium yellow light, which tends green (yellow), and cadmium yellow, which tends toward orange/red.
If you want to mix a bright saturated orange using such a palette, you’d combine cadmium red and cadmium yellow, rather than alizarin red and/or cadmium yellow light – a combo that produces duller, less saturated oranges. And so on.
Here are a few of my paintings using the split primary palette.
More recently, as a result of a zoom class with Bernie Dellario and a number of painting buddies, I’ve been working with an even MORE limited palette — just three primaries + white & a neutral earth red: Hansa yellow; pyrole red; ultramarine blue; transparent red oxide and Titanium white. What a challenge, but I think I’m getting the hang of mixing a broad range of colors from these meager starting points. Here are some recent paintings using this palette.
Here is the series of monochrome studies, all 6″ x 8″, done during the workshop with Bernie Dellario. Such a concentrated repetition of that exercise was useful in helping us spot values quickly.
For Day 6, I posted a more conventional figurative piece ~~ a young visitor who plopped herself down to wait til her mom finished visiting. She was such a sweet ‘Patient Reader’.
