Painting #119, a very good day

It was a really great day, spent the day with my dear friend and painted all day, well, most of the day, and I did get my painting done before 11:00 p.m. today, I had it done about 9:10 p.m.

I did a fairly complicated painting today, but knew I would want to do something very nice, so I chose a photo I took for a still life workshop I did last year, this was one of several different posses I did for this particular subject matter, this is most of my marble collection, I inherited most of them from my husband's family, some where his dad's and some his brother gave me, that were at the old farmstead, and when his mother passed away, I acquired the marbles she had, and I found several containers of marbles when we cleaned out my Mother's house that we did back in the 70's, you will remember the fried marbles, we had a great time with those, plus, my husband is bringing me home marbles quite frequently (ones he salvages from spray paint cans he gets from work), and, to me, those marbles are just as beautiful as the ones with all the colors, they sure do sparkle when the sun hits them, so this painting is very special to me, and I had a really great time painting it.

This painting is done on hot pressed acid free illustration board, that I coated with gesso. I have been enjoying this surface to paint on, and I've been thinking what I could paint on it next, when I happened upon this photo of the marbles, hunting for the photo's to send off for the art show in Battle Creek, the deadline for that is Wednesday, and because my friend Susan called to remind me about it, I did get it filled out and mailed today. So, when I was setting up to paint at Lynn's, I decided that this was a great opportunity to utilize it again, and I do believe this was a perfect subject. My friend Lynn is a wonderful watercolor artist also, she and I have been friends for 30 plus years, I met her when I lived in Fort Wayne and she was my China Painting instructor, I won't bore you with the details, but sufice it to say, we always have a great time painting when I go there.

I will tell you a little bit about this painting, I sketched out the jars and then put the marbles in, the first thing I painted was the background, I used purple, Indian red and some Golden Lake (or Quinacradone Gold), that was laid in in sort of a striped pattern behind the jars, then I decided to put the small marble can in and the marbles that are falling out of that and the ones that are on the table, I kept changing the colors, then I started with the antique canning jar with the marbles, I floated the colors in, keeping the round marble shape on the edges, I let the colors run together and once the colors were in, I cleaned out the paint and from my brush and started pulling highlights on the marbles, I handled all the marbles this way, I then did the square jar behind, and the the jar with the large shooters, this was a lot of fun and took about 5-1/2 hours (if you count the actual painting time), I really love this painting and hope you do too.