Friday 30 October 2015

really limited! - 12x9"



I did this yesterday at the boat landing down the street..........as I mentioned before I am using a very limited selection of colors. I used ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow and cadmium red (plus white) for this painting. Until last week I have sort of considered that a warm and cool of a red, blue and yellow plus white and earth tones (primarily burnt sienna) was a limited palette - boy, do I feel dumb right now. I am also surprised that I was able to paint this scene effectively with only what I used............another huge surprise was that I used very little white paint. I have to thank James Gurney's challenge on his blog for getting me to really try this.........he had a challenge to paint a graveyard scene using only three colors - in the spirit of Halloween. Though I didn't actually enter it, I did begin a painting for it and stuck to the rules.............unfortunately I didn't hear about the challenge until a few days before the deadline and couldn't finish the painting in time because it was raining so hard that my paint wouldn't stick to the panel and my palette was completely impossible. Despite all that, when I realized what was happening with my colors, I felt this huge sense of excitement and liberation! I will write more about this in the future because I am just blown away by how simple this is.

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