Before I leave on my 3-week Italy vacation, I thought I’d get one more blog post up! Here’s where the work on the bowl started. It was super-hard to get this drawing correct. You can see all of the corrections and erasures. Just when I thought I had it, I’d notice that something was off. Drawing really has to be done over the course of several days, with time between sessions, so that your eye can be refreshed. Too much staring at something distorts your perceptions.
Below is the underpainting, done in lead white and burnt sienna. I painted what will be the green area in cadmium yellow. I plan to glaze over this area in bright green. This makes for a much brighter green than you can achieve with solid paint. The underpainting is much lighter in value than the painting will be. This helps keep the colors brighter and truer. I don’t worry about details or subtlety in the underpainting, because it will all be painted over. It mostly serves to unify the colors and as a guide for the paint that follows.
The next step, below, is to paint the local colors in their correct values (still with no nuance or detail). I will end up correcting these values and colors as the painting progresses. When there is more paint down, I’ll be able to compare and make better judgements. You can see the first layer of green glaze over the yellow portion.
Below, I have put down all of the local colors in the surrounding areas, so I can start refining. I glazed the purple section darker, added a bit more detail on the rim, and glazed in the shadow on the base.
Highlights always come closer to the end. Below, I’ve started to indicate them. I added the stripe detail on the gold section, and the gold dividing lines between sections. I continue to refine the rim. These details were very hard to see. It took a lot of looking! I softened all of the edges on the outlines of the bowl. Curved objects always have a softness to their edges to show that the form continues around.
Finally,below, I refined the highlights, and added the subtle reflected lights from the other objects in the set-up.
I’ll be back in mid-October!
Linda Mann Artist 