Day 1 and I’m already struggling. The yellow has been pretty difficult to mix so far. The green created by mixing the yellow and blue was really gross. You can see it only in a tiny part of this painting behind the trees on the right on the distant mountainside. My main way of getting a useable, muted green is mixing yellow and black. I’m really happy with this painting as my first, and I’m excited to see where I improve as this challenge goes on.
Day 2. The limitations of the Lemon Yellow Hue were very much apparent in the creation of this painting. I struggled with every single mix. The tint strength of the yellow is pretty low and contains white so a lot of my mixes take on a muddy quality. I also keep mixing too much paint. I have almost the color I want then add a touch of red, blue, or black and overpower my mix, so I have to add more, more yellow. Two paintings in and I’ve already used 4 times as much yellow than any of the other colors. Issues aside, I do like how this painting ultimately turned out.
Day 3. It turns out the white is way more of an issue than the yellow. I didn’t notice it as much in the first two paintings, but it was an unavoidable problem in this third painting. The white is thick to the point of being unusable. I mixed in an absurd amount of medium which made it move around, but it would just flatten out in a thick layer on my palette. Once I finally got a little on my brush, it was excessively difficult to wipe it onto the canvas. Once on the canvas, it was thick and didn’t blend with the paint around it.
Frustrated, I initially gave up on this painting. After thinking on it for a while I decided to experiment and mix some linseed oil into the Titanium White. With the added oil, it finally behaved like oil paint is supposed to. I then massaged the tube of white hoping there is oil in there somewhere but I’ll probably have to keep adding oil as I go. I’m not going to lie, three days in and I’m already pretty disappointed with this brand of paint. I don’t know how they have so many glowing reviews. I looked for bad reviews and only found a brief mention by Carol Marine (a popular daily painter) about quality control issues.
Day 4. This painting went quite a bit more smoothly than the previous 3. With a solution to the thick white issue and growing used to the excessive quantities of yellow needed, it was easier to focus on actually painting. It is literally impossible with my color selection to mix the actual color of the red dirt, but I’m reasonably happy with the colors I achieved. It is still a struggle to mix nice darks, but I think I’m managing ok. I’ve started experimenting with using a rubber nib tool to draw details and I think I like the effect. It really gives the bushes in the foreground a hard scratchy texture. Since nearly everything in the desert is hard, scratchy or pokey, expect to see this effect a lot.
Day 5. I’ve been so pleased with how my skies have turned out so far that I decided to try a sunset. Turns out I was probably a little overambitious. For quite a while it only looked good in a dim room from a distance, but I think I may have managed to get it somewhat presentable. I have a couple more dark sunsets that I think I may end up avoiding or complete them toward the end of the challenge. I have a small confession with this painting. I did use a touch of cadmium red. I would have also used cadmium yellow, but the small smear leftover on my palette had already dried. It didn’t help much anyway.
Day 6. I really miss using Burnt Umber for my sketches. I’ve used it for years, and until now I haven’t really appreciated the warm neutral tones it contributes to a painting. In this painting, I used a too bright purple for the sketch and it ended up showing through in the mountains quite a bit. I don’t hate it, but it was such a powerful color that I had a hard time working with it. I must remember to grey down whatever color I use for my sketch from now on.
I’ve had this reference photo for a really long time and there has always been something about it that has drawn me to it. The photo itself is too zoomed out, making everything look small and shows too much flat sky. I took quite a few liberties, making some things larger, some smaller and recomposing. I think I captured everything about the photo that drew me to it while leaving out what didn’t work.
Day 7. If I haven’t said it before, I’ll say it now: Painting is hard. Just when I think I’m getting good, painting suddenly gets frustrating and difficult again. Only one, maybe two in 7 paintings are easy. The rest
Now at the end of my first week, I’m definitely getting better at color mixing from this limited palette. I have three basic mixes that I’ve used for all of these paintings: Green (yellow+black), muted purple (red+blue+yellow), and brown (yellow+red+green). Yellow is heavily used in nearly every mix so I am really going through it. It’ll be interesting to see just how much of each color has been used at the end of this challenge.
And, since I’m apparently piling on the challenges this month, I added a new member to my family. She is a 13 week old Brittany. I haven’t settled on a name yet, but if anyone has any ideas I’d love to hear them.
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Yay! Black and yellow makes some awesome greens! Keep up the good work, Amber, you can do this and you’re getting some nice results already! 🙂
Thank you, Hilda. 🙂 I’m pretty happy with how these are turning out. I love using phthalo green for my greens so it was a bit of an adjustment.