Painting experiments are kind of like scouting missions. You blunder off into the unknown, thrashing around and hoping to find something useful you can bring back. Occasionally, you do. I’ve been searching for a different way to paint flowers lately, especially roses. If you paint them too precisely, they look like they’re made of porcelain.
Roses in a Blue Vase
These roses are from the same bush as yesterday’s painting – a different colour harmony this time. In fact, this painting is really about the colour harmony more than anything else. I think the is the closest I’ve got so far to my idea of how the flake white can be made to represent rose
Garden Roses
Oil on panel, 5 x 7 inches. Click here to bid This painting is my first time painting with Natural Pigments Flake White #2. I don’t often get worked up about a specific paint, but this flake white is truly wonderful. The consistency is perfect for sculpting flower petals – and I find that lately
Pink Roses from Paddy’s Garden
“Pinks from Paddy’s Garden” – oil on panel, 12 by 9 inches. This painting is up for auction, Click here to bid. In the nine months since we sold our house near London and moved out to the countryside we’ve seen the seasons change from late autumn, through winter, spring and now high summer. Each
A new painting: “Vessels”
Seeing is complicated.
I’ve spent more hours than I can count judging colours, trying to match them as closely as I can, learning how to shift them slightly this way or that.
Now, I’m practising combining them in different ways, and my thought process is changing.
New Painting: A Water Dropper
Who knows what really goes into our paintings? I’m not sure we do ourselves, completely. I’ve been struggling to work through some ideas for a little while and have produced quite a few paintings recently that moved me closer towards what I was looking for but didn’t come off. All the ideas seemed to coalesce
Warm, cool and the middle way
When Prince Siddhartha Gautama decided to renounce his privileged position and search for enlightenment, he started by attempting to starve himself to his goal. When that didn’t work out, He changed tack. He tried the middle way, neither self-indulgence nor self-mortification, and achieved nirvana. Personally, I know next to nothing about Buddhism, despite being attracted
The CMYK palette – how and why?
One of the more popular of the “primary” palettes for painting you might have heard of is the CMYK palette. Cyan, magenta, yellow and black. The “primaries” here are cyan, magenta and yellow. The black is added, presumably, to extend the value range. I’ll be honest: Before I started looking seriously at this palette I
How to get better at colour design
Of all the aspects of colour, design is the one that is generally assumed to be something you have, or you don’t. Personally, I’ve never accepted that point of view about anything. Any skill can be learned, can be taught and can be practised. Including Colour design. But how? Perhaps the best known treatise on
Can you really paint with just the primaries plus white? (Part two: Greens)
This post is a follow up from a post a couple of weeks ago where I attempted to paint an orange realistically using a very limited palette – on often referred to as the primary palette: Ultramarine blue Cadmium yellow Quinacridone rose (basically a slightly purple red, any will do) White (because it’s impossible to
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