I hadn’t planned on returning to the painting. However I did want to take notes on where I could improve. So I took the picture I posted yesterday and put it into my iPad painting app. I also had a picture of a palette by a very famous painter named Cesar Santos. I sampled the colors from his palette and made my own digital palette on the iPad. I was then able to pick them and mix them with my pencil, almost like using a paintbrush in real life.
Values aren’t a problem for me, and by values I mean understanding and applying paint from darks to lights. Color temperature has been my recent hangup. I see painters like Cesar Santos and Juliette Aristides putting out beautiful works because they have a mastery of the subject. I want to have that mastery as well, so I have been studying and practicing relentlessly.
So I started painting digitally over the top of the photo of my practice painting. I tried to reason with myself when to use a cool tone and when to use a warm tone, and also when to use a neutral tone. Overall I think I might be kind of happy with the results…but I still don’t feel super confident on my choices. I will keep working on it.