I decided to begin my session with adding some shadows, since the paint on the tabletop had dried. I had obscured my drawing of the shadows with the overpainting, so I eye-balled them. I used a glaze of ultramarine blue and raw umber. I wiped away most of the glaze, because there are many areas within the shadows that are very light, and the color of the tabletop has to shine through. When the glaze dries, I’ll add more for the darker areas.
Above, you can see the color of the tabletop shining through the glaze.
At my next session, I added another glaze to darken some of the shadows. I glazed the shadow of the vase on the wrinkled paper. I mostly completed my first layer of paint on the paper. It’s a very rough approximation, with no subtlety. I find that with complex surfaces that are difficult to see properly, it’s helpful to paint just the most basic forms at first. This enables me at the next session to be able to see even more clearly, and to build on my foundation with more refined details.
I put another layer of paint on the small yellow stone and the red one, correcting the colors and shapes. I darkened the top right side of the geode with some think paint. Later, I’ll darken it further with a glaze to get that transparent look I like to have in my shadows. I could have simply glazed it now, but I think that I needed to define the geode’s edge with some thick paint first. One of the beauties of oil paint is in the luscious texture of the paint. A painting with too many glazes instead of direct painting looks rather flat and unconvincing. It can look like a colored drawing, and not an oil painting.
Linda Mann Artist 