Thankfully I was able to get one of the printouts big enough at 12x12 inch so I could use it to trace the design onto my canvas instead of drawing it. A bit of graphite paper and some creative interpretations of the flowers later and I have this.
My original plan was to use Winton titanium white and 1980 mars black. Mix the two with a thick calcite putty. The 1980 brand mars black was very wet and had a lot of binder separation. Even before I put the putty in, it didn't feel very impressive. The putty was made with the Gamblin pigment PW18 which should be a transparent calcite powder, but made the paints even more milky. Two strokes on the canvas and I knew this wasn't going to work. So I painted all the lovely paint I just mixed onto a bit of canvas paper in a greyscale kind of thing. This is useful for testing glazing samples.
Instead, I went with what I know, the same white but Old Holland brand mars black... some extremely expensive paint I got for a steel on a "last chance" sale. This is no longer an easy paint to get here. Aka, hard to replace, expensive. I don't really want to use it. But I really want this painting to work.
My usual five piles. I try to get the middle to match middle grey and I got pretty close this time. I try not to use the black and the white when I'm painting an underpainting but for this one, there is a lot of area that needed black. Which is good because that pile - the one that didn't get mixed with white - the pile of black off to the far right, dried beyond use in about four hours!
Old Holland is an awesome paint, or so I'm told, because it has such an incredibly high pigment load. It's also why I'm annoyed with it. The old holland paints are designed to be used with a medium and I like painting right from the tube better. But a tiny touch of linseed oil and it's working (about five drops for the whole paint session).
And this is where I got to.
I was shocked by how difficult that terminator line was on the egg. That's the line where the egg suddenly turns from light to shadow side - like the dusk/dawn line on earth. And like the dawn/dusk line, I didn't quite get it right as it's... how to explain. If one is in the tropics or near the equator, dusk happens FAST. Sun is up, beautiful sunset for a few moments, then smack! sun is down. And I know this because in my foolish youth I went for a walk in the desert one afternoon. It's only a half hour taxi ride, and the other town is just over there, let's just save the money and walk, then spend it on a nice meal in a restaurant. And then the sunset came and boy was that beautiful, and look, stars, and all turned around looking at the different sky stuff. Um... which way were we walking again? There was zero light anywhere. No one waiting for us. And suddenly our shorts and tank tops seemed woefully inadequate. It felt like about 5 hours of confusion, but the watch said it was only about 12 minutes. Then suddenly, someone turned on the electricity and the town we were trying to get to was only a little to the right of where we expected it. We were shivering already and too cold to eat by the time we reached town.
Never again shall I go walking unguided in the desert at sunset.
anyway. eggs.
I'm from the Far North and sunsets here take Hours! Not a few minutes like near the equator. There, the sun practically falls from the sky. Here, well... it's 4pm in late spring. The shadows are getting long and it won't be long before the trees start to hide the sun a bit - maybe two or three hours from now. And dusk will start soon after - so four or five hours. Dark comes properly just after 9:30pm. Ish. It's still plenty light enough to see without a flashlight even without a moon.
It wasn't like that in the dessert. 12 minutes from "wow, look at that sunset" to "oh, shit, it is so dark, we are fucked!"
eggs.
The terminator line looks consistent on an egg, but I think that's not right. I got to paint more eggs to find out. I wonder if I find the further from the light source, the more time dusk takes.
And as I was painting the egg and trying to blend the shadows and light to smooth out that transition, the line kept moving. I had to put my picture back on it and retrace the line which was most of an inch away from me fussing with the paint. the egg was looking pretty wonky.
But I think I got it good enough for this layer.
Because the paint is drying so fast, I'm trying to work in sections instead of across the whole painting like I want to. I got to keep telling myself that I can fix things in the next layers. It's a hard thing to remember.
Now, if only I could find a few hours painting time without unscheduled humans I might be able to get in the swing of things.
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