Painting #170 - second in the egg series

I had a bit extra time today since it was my day off and my classes for Sturgis have been canceled this month due to some surgery one of the students was having done today (today would have been the first class for July), she has made arrangements for a ride for the first part of August so we should be back on schedule, hopefully everything went well and she will be able to come to class in August.

I looked through the china cabinet again, to find a suitable dish, the pink one was fun, so I decided to try another one, this dish is one I got from my mother, it's a beautiful dish but I seldom use it, so it seemed a good idea to use it for a prop. I decided on 3 eggs this time, 2 in the dish (I had originally put the 3 eggs in the dish, but this arrangement seemed better), so, once I decided on the composition, I took photo's (mostly so that I could put the eggs back in the refrigerator, so I set it up, but took pictures to work from, one thing is that the light source stays constant in the photo, I spent about 2 hours on this painting, it's much bigger, the first one I did was on a 6" x 6" canvas, this one is about 9" x 12", and is opaque watercolors on 300 lb. hot press watercolor paper. I really enjoyed painting on the paper this time, I've been so stuck on the gesso, but this time I went with the bare paper. I started out by sketching, then I floated in the pale background, moving from blue to pink to yellow and mixing it up so it's not all the same color, I used the same colors that I painted the eggs and the bowl with, only paler. I then started putting in the blue gray color for the bowl, it changes colors so quickly that I decided to give it a unifying wash of blue gray paler in some places, with the opaques, you can go in and alter the colors, lighter on top of darker, with transparent colors, you either have to paint around the lights or mask them, I'm not as fond of masking, I've done it but it's not my favorite, I always get too much in a hurry and mess up the mask by not taking the correct amount of time to get it in the right place. So, the opaques have been wonderful for this project. Once the first layer of blue was in, I moved on to the eggs, I really enjoyed painting these eggs, the colors are so subtle, moving from warm to cool and the shadows, dark in some places, it's just such a challenge, and the same with the crystal bowl, I really moved back and forth with the lights and darks for the bowl, I had to really fudge some of it, it's virtually impossible for me to do photographic, I am not a photographic artist, I can get it to look photographic but it is not, if you really look close you can see that I didn't get it exact, there are some bits of turquoise here and there too, so now that it's done, I really like this little painting, and I hope you do too.