Amy Mann's painting a day: March 2010

Thursday, March 25, 2010

"Daffodils", oil on canvas, 22"x18"

I'll bet you were wondering when I was going to pick up a paintbrush again! I just needed to not paint for awhile. I've been knitting instead. But now I feel like painting again, so I have made a start. The daffodils made me do it. I consider this a sucky painting, necessary after so long a hiatus. Now that I've gotten the sucky painting out of my system, I can move on to better things.

A Painting a Day?

Well, OK, if you're paying attention, you've probably noticed that I don't actually post a painting a day. What with two teenagers, a dirty house, errands to run, meals to cook, etc, I can't always devote the studio time. But I'm trying!

These little paintings (all 6"x8", because I have a whole box of that size canvas board) are done in one sitting, usually about 1 1/2-2 hours. I mix all my colors from a limited palette of Permalba White, camium yellow, cadmium red light, cadmium red dark, alizarine permanent, ultramarine blue, manganese blue, and dioxazine purple. I'll occasionally reach for other tube colors, but for the most part I mix everything from these. I don't have any black, so I have to mix that, and I mix all my greens and most of my violets and grays (the dioxazine purple I mostly use to mix rich browns in combination with cad yellow.)

Since the paintings are done in one sitting, the paint is always wet, so I have to lay it down thickly and with a light touch to avoid picking up what's underneath, if I want to cover over something or make a correction. Premixing my palette results in fairly large piles of premixed colors, so I can just scoop up a big brushful of paint. I do my premixing with palette knives, which saves a lot of paint from going to waste.

The objects I am painting are shown life-size or larger, and very close up for the most part. I am very interested in color, as you may have guessed. I try to match the color that I see, and I spend a lot of time looking at different areas of the setup through a paper-punch sized hole in a gray card, a "color isolator". This helps immensely in figuring out what color something is.

For all the paintings, you can click on the image for a larger, more detailed view.

Amy Mann's painting a day

Thursday, March 25, 2010

"Daffodils", oil on canvas, 22"x18"

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