Today was a very productive art day. I started out my morning by going to the Hipbone Studio life drawing session. Then I ended up the day with a still life painting where I tested a very limited palette.
The Saturday morning open studio sessions are the best. I don’t have to deal with traffic and I get 3 hours of drawing from a figure done by 1pm, plenty of time to relax the rest of the day or acquire motivation to do more art.
My warmup page as usual, I will be writing a page about my warmup process soon. I think it’s an important topic to cover.
I was extremely happy with these 5 minute drawings. My drawing accuracy was spot on and I didn’t have to do any correction. I moved through each pose and each accurately and with no corrections.
I should always draw like this. I know its not much to look at but it’s very accurate. I’m moved through this entire drawing in 15 minutes and the result is avery accurate contour of the entire scene. If the pose was three hours long the remaining 2 hours and 45 minutes would be a breeze, full of rendering value and small drawing corrections.
Another drawing I’m ver happy with.
After returning home I watched a movie, relaxed and planned for a lazy Saturday. I didn’t plan to get motivated to paint again but after watching videos on YouTube I couldn’t help but start a short still life painting and continuing with my productive art day.
The purpose of this still life was to test a very limited palette. I recently purchased a bunch of paints based on Daniel E Greene’s palette which consisted of 12-14 colors. After painting with it several time and doing some color charts I decided that it was way too confusing. The only thing the extra colors were doing was possibly decreasing my mixing time. But most of the time I would try to mix my colors and get confused on just which color to mix in my current pile to move the value or hue where I wanted it.
So I setup 5 colors on my palette and set out to reproduce the rest of the Daniel Greene palette. With white, cadmium yellow medium, alizarin crimson, burnt umber, and ultramarine blue. I was able to mix most of all of the other colors used in the Greene palette. Plus after doing this small painting, I found color mixing simple and to the point.
First I would get the value correct, this is paramount. The green base in the still life is a good example. I mixed up a green with ultramarine blue and yellow, with a bit more ultramarine than yellow to keep the value dark. Then I ask myself, is the value correct and does the color need to be warmer or cooler? If it needs to be cooler and lighter add more white, if the color needs to be darker and warmer add burnt umber. With simple movements all my colors turned out rich and somewhat accurate.
Of course I will keep all the other colors, their nice to have for those hard to reach colors, like bright turquoise or a bright purple. Usually these extreme colors are never found in nature.
That was the end of my productive art day, and I have to think the internet for the motivation. Actually when I look back on it, I’m motivated all the time by other artists on the internet, soon I will write a page of all my goto places for motivation on the internet.
