Old Green Bottle

3rd November 2005

This is a small green bottle which Michelle bought last time we went up north to see the family. We got it with a couple of others from a little shop in Whitby. I’d had enough of shopping and couldn’t be bothered looking at them, now I’m painting them so Michelle gets a big ‘I told you so’ on that one.

Not happy with this painting. As I remember it started pretty well. I did it over two days, and after the paint had been so thin on the last one (the pomegranate), I intended to let it get a bit thicker with this one. Strange that it still ended up so thin. Maybe its because I was still just using turps to thin the paint. I couldn’t decide what to do with the shadows, and the more I worked on it the further away from me it got. It looks like a sketch, like it could be a pastel.

I painted this over two sittings of about three hours each. Somewhere during the second sitting it went wrong and I wimped out and painted the details on the bottle to try and save it. I bottled in fact. I set out to record the colours as I saw them and I produced a cop out. I was quite annoyed with myself when I finished this. I told myself I’d feel better about it later and it was ok, but I find I like it less and less.

I intend to have another go at this bottle at some point.

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