Overall Thoughts

This is my second ever color painting! Mixing colors seemed harder this time…

And then I realized I’d done the wrong assignment. I was supposed to do a still life original painting…oops…

• Decided to try a new way to compare colors:
  • Put saran wrap on top of the color photo to protect it from stray paint
  • Then used a clear palette from the palette set I ordered at the beginning of the year (finally those extra palettes come in handy!) because it’s clear, I thought I could mix colors on top of the palette and compare it to the photo below.
  • Ended up still using my old “cut-hole-in-palette-paper-strips” a few times for the tennis ball though, because I used up the space
  • Washed up a LOT. Frequently walked back and forth between bathroom and painting corner because I kept staining my hands…and also to clean off my round palette eventually so I could reuse the surface to mix more paint.

TK YT Pub Assignment video

Total time spent:

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

• Check lesson videos first!
• Keep track of what colors I mixed
• Draw the image in my sketchbook
• Squeeze out a bit less paint each time
• Need a more systematic way to test color mixes

Day 1

• Sat. 10/22/22 – Painted from about 10am to 6pm+
• Worked on a color chart with the leftover paint
• Set up the shades first, as usual, before mixing colors.
• First, mixed the pink mushroom color, then the yellow-green tennis ball, then the blue cylinder, then the lighter brown table, then the darker brown background. As far as I recall, these are the colors I used (next time I’ll keep better track!)
  • Mushroom:
    • First, I mixed the three different “reds” (schev red, english red, madder crimson) each with white to see what kind of pinks I got.
    • I decided that the crimson + white was closest to going in the right direction
    • But it was too red, so I added some yellow–green to reduce the redness
    • Then added a bit more schev yellow (and white, to reduce the chroma)
    • Then threw in a touch of schev blue, for some reason…(apparently it was a touch too orange for me, so I wanted to tone that down with the opposite color)
    • (Took many tries, because I experimented with other colors at first before settling on that mix above)
    • And although I wasn’t fully satisfied with the color, I couldn’t figure out what else I could do to make it better, so I went with that color. In retrospect, it actually turned out a bit better than I expected/hoped, but we’ll see how I feel tomorrow or when I submit the assignment next week or so… 🙂
  • Tennis ball:
    • At a glance, I knew this would be some kind of yellow green, so first I mixed both greens with my schev yellow to see what the hue would be.
    • I ended up going with yellow-green + schev yellow
    • Then added a touch of crimson to de-intensify the green
    • And white to lessen the chroma
    • (There may have been some pollution from the perm green, too)
  • Cylinder:
    • For this one, I set out both blues, and mixing them to see what’d happen
    • I ended up beginning with ultramarine blue + burnt umber
    • But it was too dark, so then threw in some naples yellow to create a kind of navy blue color
    • And that’s it!
  • Table:
    • I started with burnt umber and experimented with mixing it with white vs mixing it with naples yellow, and settled on naples yellow
    • Then tried adding some schev yellow
    • It obviously wasn’t red enough, so I tried adding some english red to the mix.
    • Then I tried lightening it with a touch of titanium white
  • Background
    • I started with burnt umber + crimson
    • Plus a touch of white to lighten the chroma.

Final Submission

This is the final painting I submitted for grading:

I submitted the assignment at around 10:17pm on Mon, 11/1, and got a response on 11/2 at 2:05pm.

Instructor Feedback

• I learned that the underside of the mushroom is a reflection and should be shadow, not colored. (I thought so but wasn’t sure, good to have that confirmed)
• And the tennis ball and all shadowed objects should be one color per shadow, none of this MS and ES stuff that I did on my tennis ball, it should have all been MS. Again, I kind of suspected it, but went against that gut feeling. Good to have the teachers tell me I was right the first time!