Doodling Clouds and Sketching In Paint

I said in my last post that I had doodled some clouds as practice for an upcoming painting. There was another reason I did it too, though and that’s stress relief. I hadn’t painted in a couple of weeks, and as you might guess, I was getting pretty antsy. I was almost feeling guilty for not doing any art. With my mental state at the time, though, I couldn’t handle the pressure of an actual project. I needed to do something where I had the luxury of not caring how it came out. Cheap pads of paper or boards are perfect for this. You can throw your project away when you’re done if you want.

​I don’t think allow myself to just play with paint often enough. It felt really good to it at that time. The stress lifted off of me for the moment.

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I’ve decided I’m going to paint my crow with a base of dark green and not black. He’s going to have purplish brown shadows on him. If I paint him solid black, he’ll look flat, like a silhouette.

On July 7, I set about mixing a green for the bird. The well I mixed in already had a greenish yellow color in it. I want a very dark bluish green for my purposes. I thought I could start by mixing some ultramarine into the paint that was already in the well. This could be enough to get me the color I was looking for, I thought. As I dripped more and more blue in to the well, tested the color, and saw that it stayed brown, I knew this wasn’t the case. It was going to take my eons to get the color I was looking for this way, if it would work at all. I thought, I’ll use the green that’s in my tube and add blue to it. That’ll work. It seemed to for a bit, but I was surprised, and not pleasantly so, to find that after awhile, the more blue I added, the more brown and gray the color became. I thought the color that was already in the well must be muddying it up. I needed to clean the well of the old paint and try again.

Later, in a clean well, I put my green and then mixed some blue into it. When I tested it, I liked the results. I decided to mix some red into it, thinking that, because red is the complement of green, this would help to darken and mute the color. When I did it, though, I must have mixed too much because it turned the mixture brown. I mixed more green and blue and I'm going with that.

Then I put down some purple in another well and some yellow to mute and brown it out. I made a couple of sketches of the bird I’m planning to paint.

I haven’t explored sketching in mediums other than pencil very much, but I’ve heard it can be a good way to plan a painting. Seeing how these colors look next to each other on paper gives me more clarity and more confidence than imagining them in my head.

What's Happening With My Video?

Well, I had to put my video demo of painting a blue heron on the back burner, due to technical difficulties. I was going back and forth with the Wondershare team and while they were very accommodating, I’d reached the point yesterday where there was nothing more I could do until I heard from them again. I moved forward and started editing my anhinga painting video. Well, great news! This morning I heard back from the Wondershare team again, and following their instructions, I was able to get sound back in my video! I can go back to editing it.​

That's all for now. I'll talk to you again next time.