Lots of testing today and recommitting to trying to get this painting finished.
For this morning’s session The first thing I did was check the paint that I left on my palette with some toilet paper coated and clove oil on my pallet wrapped in a plastic bag. The clove oil fumes are supposed to keep the paint from drying.
This is not a perfect test because all of the paint that I have mixed on my palette contains a lot of titanium white which by its basic nature stays wet for a lot longer. But I do have some very thin passages of paint on my palette and they are very wet. Actually everything is very wet. The true test would be with transparent earth orange and burnt umber.
The second thing that I did today was start again on the paper cross painting. I remembered that I promised myself to start finishing paintings and I got sidetracked away from this painting was studying color. So I’m going to bring everything that I’ve learned just recently and color study back to this painting again and to see how I can change it from here.
Also I discovered that I can white balance every single Photoshop document that I have by using the warming filter 85, setting its density to 40%, and removing preserve luminosity. When I test these settings by creating a perfectly white square on the monitor and holding titanium white over it they look almost exactly the same. What’s interesting though is that when I take a photo of it with my phone the monitor always looks a bit warmer.
One thing I forgot to mention from yesterday was about mixing skin tones. I find that I need about three hues to make up a generalized local skin tone for the model I’m looking at. But I can use a combination of all of those four mixtures to render all of the subtle variations within skin tones.
Doing the best I can, hummingbird style!
Get the best PM bookend I can. I’m going to need it for tomorrow.
Shut down on time and cool my brain well before bed.
Is a new project I’m starting with Josh Johnson where we are…
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