Back in the studio!

Huzzah, back in the art studio today, after a reasonable break due to dance mum-related tasks.

With all of the eistedfods over for the year, and most new costumes done (until the Christmas concert), I have had much less to do in a costuming department. We have one solo eisteddfod to come in a couple of weeks, however there are no new costumes for that, so I have not needed to do any more sewing and costume creating over the last couple of weeks.

So the one-hour daily painting that has been sitting on my easel half-finished for the last two months at least can now be finished.

I'd say that it's simply the fact that I have been busy with dance stuff, but it's more like the fact that really and truly I just lost touch with the painting again for a few weeks. However, here we are and we are back.

I also have some new paint colours to deal with.

Where i was last painting session

When last I was posting my daily paintings, I was in the middle of changing my paint brand from the Atelier Interactive paints, which I do like very much, to the Matisse Structure paints, which I also like very much.

It's annoying though, because I have so many of the Atelier Interactives. It's hard to not go out and buy the whole set in the new brand. However, the Atelier Interactives are designed to be a little bit remixable if you need them to, so you can paint a little bit more like oil paint and reactivate the paint layer underneath. And I have decided that I don't want that for the moment, so I have changed over to a more normal brand of paints.

And the Matisse Structure paints, are high quality, good price, and have a good **range **here in Australia. So we have gone with them.

I actually started off today's task with a color experiment, so we'll go on with that, and then I will show you the completed daily painting that I have done.

As always, all my daily paintings are not designed to be masterpieces. They are designed to take an hour, sometimes an hour and a half, just to get a scene done, color on paper, and take an idea from draft to finished in as short an amount of time as I can. Stops me overthinking things.

Anyway, let's go on to what I started with today, which was a color test of the new colors.

Quick Colour test

Not that I really needed to, but I started today with the color test. Not so much to know what colors the paints might create, but just to get my head back into the concept of putting brush onto canvas without buggering up the final copy of the little daily painting.

As a general rule, I work in my palette with warm and cool versions of the same color. It's called a split palette. So I will have** two blues, two reds, two yellows, and a couple of other key colors, like a burnt sienna, sometimes dioxazine purple**, which I find quite helpful, white, black, sometimes a couple of earth colors, depending on what I'm doing.

So I started off with these because a couple of the colors were new. So I had two yellows and two reds, a warm and a cool of each:

Cool red + cool yellow Cool red + warm yellow Warm red + warm yellow Warm red + cool yellow

And all I did was quickly have a little bit of a play with the colors just to get some idea of what they look like, and you can see the results here: different mixes of oranges, pinks, and yellows coming through. Obviously the cooler reds lean a lot more pink, whereas warmer reds lean a lot more orange.

Finishing the Daily Painting

As I said above, all of my daily paintings are designed to be quite quick little daily studies. They are not designed to be perfect, and I had this one. There was an idea in my head that there was supposed to be two sort of converging layers of the water through the... It just didn't work.

I wasn't dreadfully happy with it. I think that's maybe why I stopped last time, is because it wasn't going where I needed to go. So I decided to **simplify **the picture a little bit and remove the other aspect from the front right-hand corner.

So I made some light glazes to go over the sky, so basically just mixing a transparent color, which was **ultramarine **in this case, with some medium, just touching up a few of the areas to unmuddy a few things, putting in a few extra lights and scrubbing in a little bit of extra color in the sky.

And then I moved on to the foreshore, where I extended the light patch over the damp sand and just increased a little bit of the contrast on the left sandbank that was in there.

The sand, you know, in the dark has quite a lot of color in it, even though it is nighttime. It's not actually black, and in this case, in that left-hand side there, there is actually no black in that. That is simply mixes of muted blues and purples and yellows in there.

I didn't actually even have black on my palette for this. So it's quite a rich black, an optical black, an optical dark, and when you look at it up close, you can see the areas where blue glows through, or you can see the highlights and red in the black.

And then I quickly finished up a little bit of water in the front and left it at that.

I'm not 100% happy with the light in the front. I think it's a little bit muddy still. However, the main light in the picture is in the center, so perhaps it shouldn't be quite as light in that front corner.

However, as I said, this is an hour painting. It is not designed to be perfect, and I am leaving it at that for my first little wee effort back, and I will move on to the next painting.

**Anyway, I'm going to leave the post here and maybe get on and start another one. **

HERE ARE SOME OF MY RECENT DAILY PAINTINGS

LOVE AND LIGHT

HAPPY PAINTING