Amy Mann's painting a day: June 2010

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

My all new web site!

I have just updated my web site, and it's all new. Please visit amymann.com. Your comments are welcome. Please let me know if you find any problems with the site. I am also going to change my blogs, since I'll be using my web site more. I'll still have a copying blog, but I will probably delete my Adventures in Painting and my Portrait blogs. This Painting a Day blog will still exist, but I will probably change its name to "New Work". Stay tuned. (If you like to follow my museum copies, you should probably subscribe to that blog, Copying at the National Gallery.)

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

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

My all new web site!

Friday, June 18, 2010

Wapping, Day 2

Friday, June 11, 2010

New National Gallery copy begun

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