Thursday, August 27, 2009

Change Takes How Many Days?

I have a new pochade box on the way.  It is a self contained unit aimed at hiking in as opposed to car side painting.  It is quite light and of course it has a few limitations.  The only one that is forcing a change is that the brushes are stored diagonally across the painting surface in travel mode.  This means that I will have to change my palette arrangement since I leave my unused paint on the palette between paintings.  I don't need to get the paint off brushes before I start.

Sun or Shade, 10x12, Oil on board


Here is my palette moving forward.  The mineral violet I have placed at the far left of the palette has moved to the far right to make room for eventual brush storage.  I am already confusing it for Ultramarine Blue and it looks more blue on this side of the palette - those surrounding colours!  I will do the same on my studio palette so it becomes habit.  You don't want to be looking around for a pigment for mixing.  The rest of the palette remains unchanged.  There is no rule for this, no right and wrong.  I lay out my palette with light yellow in the middle.  The I go green, blue, violet to the right, and yellow, orange, red to the left.  The pigment is laid out as "worms" to facilitate crisp clean colours, and the worms are significant so as to avoid a starving palette which forces one to interrupt the painting process to squeeze out for a top up.  Normally in Plein Air I use 3-5 pigments.  Here you see 7 plus white.


By the way, the colour key on the painting has been ambiguous all session.  That will be addressed in the studio along with a couple of composition details.


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