Overall Thoughts

First color painting! So exciting 🙂

Some thoughts:

• Mixing colors takes longer than you think! (especially as a beginner like me)
• Watching the mixing colors video from draw mix paint’s youtube video was SUPER helpful.
• As was reading Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green, a book on color that Kevin recommended.
• Honestly, if it wasn’t for those two resources, I definitely would have had a MUCH harder time mixing colors, I think, because the official lesson video doesn’t go really in-depth on how to mix colors.
  • Kevin just says to experiment, be careful not to add too much white or black, and also pay attention to how opposites on the color wheel diminish each other.
• Some colors are REALLY powerful. Just a TOUCH of crimson overpowers almost everything else. So I have to be careful with that.

Some things I did to prepare for this assignment, aside from watching the videos mentioned above and reading the book (still working through that, actually):

• Cut out the palette paper to the shape of my plastic see-through palettes.
• I finally get to use my smaller rectangle palette! (When I first bought reusable palettes, it came in a set of four, and I thought I’d only use the big one, but then when I realized color mixing would take a lot of trial and error, I realized I could use the other ones too!)
• So I drew out the 12 colors as laid out in the lesson videos: titanium white, naples yellow, scheveningen (schev) yellow, schev red, english red, madder crimson, yellow green, permanent green, schev blue, ultramarine blue, burnt umber, mars black
  • And of course our Extreme Shadow and Mod Shadow off to the side.
  • There’s a reason why they call “permanent green” by that name, as I found out: When I tried to wash my brushes, perm green was the only color that would not come out. Ha 🙂
• I also used the leftover scraps of palette paper and cut out little holes in them to use to match colors
• And I repurposed an empty egg carton to hold my paints so I don’t have to waste time taking them out and putting them back in their boxes.
• I also found in the kitchen a super handy little plastic sauce holder with a lid, which was PERFECT for containing linseed oil.
• My art drawer is now a LOT fuller than it was for blocks 1 & 2, what with the new paints in the egg carton, the oil holder, more palettes and photos and black-and-white tracing images, etc.

TK YT Pub Assignment video

Total time spent:

• Started around 10am and finished the painting around 4:30pm (total = 6.5 hours)
• Then used up the paints on another couple paintings in my sketchbook until around 6pm (1.5 hours)
• And then cleaned up until 8pm ish.

If I were to start this painting over right now, what would I do differently?

• If I’m right to have done gradients, I would do gradients for each object before moving on, because I waited too long and the form shadows weren’t really soft enough
• Use a little more paint when mixing colors, especially for an object with lots of surface area.
• To clean brush: dip it in the oil, but don’t press down INSIDE the cup of oil, wipe it off on a piece of scrap paper instead–actually, wipe off on the palette, and then wipe off on the paper towel
• Need more paper towels than last time, definitely.
• Try to mix colors more systematically. For example, when testing oranges, do naples yellow with the 3 reds, then the other yellow with the 3 reds, and compare results.
• Try to minimize the number of colors I mix into one hue to keep better track of what I did.
• Be more careful with the tracing. I forgot to trace the shadow on the ball, and the top horizontal line of the painting frame, too, and some lines on the apple stand. I didn’t catch the shadow on the ball problem until I had the canvas taped up. And I didn’t draw a line to separate the colored side of the background with the shadowed side.
• When making the tracing/transfer lines, don’t press down so hard. Those pencil marks get into the paint, especially for light colors.
• Don’t need to do any blending for the form shadows just yet!

Day 1

• First time painting in color with oil paints! Super exciting 😀
• Seemed like a simple color painting, but actually it was challenging enough, with five colors to mix!
• Another new thing was having to set up the trace using an actual B&W photo instead of just a line art tracing like those from Block 1. I bungled it a bit this time, but it wasn’t beyond help.
• Mixing colors took a long time, because I was trying to be extra careful. But that’s an important note to self from now on: mixing colors will take extra time, so I have to calculate that in my painting time.
• Started by trying to match the ball, then got a more pinkish color and switched to mixing the stand first.
• Note, here’s how I mixed the colors:
  • Pot-Stand
    • First, I mixed naples yellow with all 3 reds (schev red, english red, crimson) to see which one had the closest hue to what I wanted.
    • I ended up going with crimson, then adding some white to lighten it.
    • Then to reduce the red, I tried throwing in a speck of green, but decided against it in the end.
    • (Later, the instructor in an email said that the color mix should have been: schev red, naples yellow, eng red, and a bit of white. So that was way off what I guessed)
  • Apple
    • First I mixed schev yellow with the three kinds of red to see what oranges would come out. I ended up going with crimson
      • I wouldn’t have thought of orange as the starting hue, I would have thought yellow-green, but in the lesson video, Kevin was painting a pear which has a similar shade to this apple, and he started with orange, so I decided to try that.
    • Then I added some yellow-green to diminish the redness a bit
    • And a bit of naples yellow to lighten the chroma without changing the hue too much (tried white first, but naples yellow ended up being better)
  • Ball
    • Started by mixing three pinks with white + the three reds, and ended up going with english red
    • And then I think I mixed in some naples yellow, and maybe some schev yellow too
  • Tabletop (and apple stem)
    • I started with english red + white 
    • Then some yellow green to lessen the redness
  • Background
    • Started with burnt umber + naples yellow
    • Then added some schev yellow
    • Then added english red
• It was also more of a challenge to find a picture to paint in my sketchbook to use up the leftover paint, but I did find a nice one of a girl in some flowers:

And also used leftover black and gray paints to try to fix this painting, but I think it’s a bit beyond help at this point, I might as well just leave it as-is and then perhaps one day when my skills are better, attempt it again:

Final Submission

This is the final painting I submitted for grading:

I submitted the assignment at at 2:09pm on Sunday 10/16, and got a response on Monday at 10:13am, but I didn’t get to actually see the feedback until 11:44am, when I could read the answers to my questions (on one computer, but not another, oddly), because the site was down! (they were having uploading issues) So I resubmitted the images at 12:39pm on Monday 10/17, and it appeared to STILL not be working…sigh…TK

My Questions & Instructor Feedback

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Lesson Video Notes

Notes on TK Assignment Name

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