Studio Time

I figured that I may as well put in the red forms… I added the orange form on the right… That empty green space was just throwing things off and I want another largish orange form on that side. I’m thinking it will balance the striped objects, pull things forward a bit and set the queen herself back a little in space. I’m a little frustrated with that dark space on the lower right as well but I think that may work in the final image. I need to make it a little more interesting though.

I scrubbed purple madder into the robe/hair form. The color there is actually pretty accurate (The greens in this image… not so much.) I scrubbed the left side back nearly to black. The texture there is the texture of the canvas. That entire form will have a narrow highlight across it and the color will change a bit. It’s actually somewhat close to what I was looking for. I blocked in the wing/arm forms with purple madder and titanium white as well. I’ve decided that purple madder is the true color of evil. Black doesn’t hold a candle to it. 🙂 (Caput mortuum, on the other hand…)

The next real decision, for me, is what to do with those forms inside the robe. I can go with a bright blue that will add contrast and blend with the colors in that space or go with something jarring like an orange or yellow. Blue wouldn’t be my typical decision… I should probably go with that. I’m going to do the bones in the wings a bright yellow. It might make for an interesting interplay between the two colors.

Most of these colors will get more intense. 🙂 I’ll eventually clean up her lipstick.

Colors: Winsor Newton’s cadmium red deep, purple madder and cadmium yellow deep, Sennelier’s alizarin crimson and titanium white and Rembrandt’s Chinese vermilion and cadmium red light.

I decided that I like the psychedelic feel to this. So… I set up a Santana/Doors/Hendrix/Big Brother/Airplane and, of course, Ultimate Spinach playlist and broke out the phthalos. I can’t think of any colors that are more suited to psychedelics.

I decided that I needed a few more striped objects to balance things out, repainted all of the greens with a combination of phthalocyanine green and lemon yellow, glazed over the black form with phthalocyanine blue and scrubbed phthalocyanine blue into the shadows here and there; again, for balance. I started on the yellowish form and tried to balance that as well.

The colors are actually a lot more intense in the painting. Seeing that I’m still shooting in near dark to counter the glare… the photo doesn’t show them all that well and turning up the saturation just makes things noisy.

Colors: Sennelier’s burnt sienna, titanium white and lemon yellow, Winsor Newton’s phthalocyanine green and Rembrandt’s phthalocyanine blue.

This has gone a little slower than I expected. The simple stuff, that I’d normally paint in without thinking about it, has decided to be difficult. I didn’t think it showed enough progress yesterday to warrant a post.

Black is a color that I typically use for outlines and details. It struck me as necessary in order to convey a “Dark Queen”. It may have been a bad decision. 🙂 It will get glazed over anyway. I think I’ve got things figured out now. At least, I’m pretty sure I know the way they’re going to go.

Colors are: Sennelier’s caput mortuum, carbon black, cobalt blue, burnt sienna, raw sienna and titanium white… Winsor Newton’s purple madder and Rembrandt’s gold ochre.

This is all worked in with acrylic paint. I’m working out some of the details. Seeing that the sketch was fairly well finalized when I transferred it… I don’t really need to do a lot of that.

Colors used are: Winsor Newton’s cobalt green, hooker’s green, permanent alizarin crimson and cadmium orange… Golden’s cobalt teal, Sennelier’s cobalt blue and Golden’s Open Acrylic dioxazine purple and C.P. cadmium red light.

Golden’s open acrylics are formulated so as to emulate oil paints. They are convenient and they do “emulate” pretty well. They don’t quite get it, but they are much nicer than traditional acrylics; they keep longer and work easier.

I am phasing out acrylics aside from a set of basic colors. I don’t actually use them for anything other than underpaintings or “utility” paints. It doesn’t make sense to pay for an additional tube of expensive colors like cobalts or cadmiums. This is something of an attempt to use up some half empty tubes. I’m a little short on earth tones, so I’m skipping a few of the elements in the underpainting. I’ll just go straight to oil. I’ll probably just buy basic sets of Utrecht, Sennelier Abstracts or Blick brand acrylics in the future.