Beginning to work up the detail on this painting and I think it will be finished next week when I can get get down to the fine detail. It is never easy trying to get a balance between an impressionistic looser style of painting which I want to get right on the background and a tighter more controlled finish on the girl’s dress and the skin tones. We shall see…what I don’t want is to end up with a ‘chocolate box’ style of painting. This can happen if the artist starts using smaller and smaller brushes, so I have resisted the temptation to go below a size 3 brush. However next week may change that… I still haven’t got a title yet in my mind so if anyone has any ideas, please send me a Tweet. My Twitter followers haven’t let me down in the past! The original photo was taken in Verona, Italy and the lovely building in the forefront is the Arena which is massive and still in very good condition. I was totally blown away by Verona, stopping off there on my way through from Milan to Venice on the train. It is a truly…
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I think this painting will benefit from a slightly looser style as I do not want to paint in all the detail in the background. Painting in the people, the shutters and windows etc will take the eye away from the main composition which is the couple, she in her brilliant yellow dress. I will, however, put some more emphasis on the Arena as it is such a spectacular building. Shadows will be important and I am making use of the complimentary colours on the Colour Wheel used by artists everywhere. So against the lemon yellow of the dress I will use my favourite shades of blue, purple and light blue for the foreground and the same in the Arena, although adding in a touch of Naples Yellow and Burnt Sienna here. Michael Harding paints are so wonderful for this sort of work as the pigments are amazing, so jewel like in comparison to other paints. More expensive, but worth the layout. The view, by the way, is Verona in Italy where I spent a great couple of days on my way through from Milan by train to Venice. I hadn’t planned to stop off here, it was an…
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‘Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.’ D.W.Winnicott I am driven by my passion to paint and I love putting up my works in progress week by week as I enjoy sharing the process whereby I get to the finished artwork. BUT… there is the other side of being an artist whereby I not very forceful and spend a lot of time alone, by necessity, at my easel quite happily. So yes….. tension! With this work, I was in Verona a couple of years ago, sitting on a bench in the sunshine with my camera to hand in case something caught my eye for a possible painting. I suddenly saw this young woman in a lemon yellow dress and the contrast with the shadows of the ground and the Arena amphitheatre to me was perfect. Yellow and purple are opposites on the colour wheel and compliment each other, so I will be painting layers of purple and blue over the lilac grey of the ground and likewise on the walls of the Arena. I think this composition will work. If you would like to be kept up to…
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