Donation continued/Phase 4
Tone and a big element -- a lattice of that covers more than fifty percent of the panels -- more on some, less on others. I block out the openings in the lattice and try to paint the lattice itself. At first I think I need to mix eighteen versions of paint -- red, orange, yellow -- a warm and cold version of each -- and a light toned version and a dark toned version of each. That way I can paint an ombre (colors that shade into each other) effect. But I realized a fast or more efficient way to do this would be to lay down the gray tones first and then paint the colors over the gray. I decided to do the left two panels from light at the top to dark at the bottom -- the right two panels -- dark at the top and light at the bottom. Four washes of gray tones later I was panicked. Could I have made something so ugly. The washes looked chalky and uneven. I didn't want to totally obscure the colors underneath. Ugh. But I was committed and decided it was time to add color. The cool red looked too purple. The warm yellow looked too green. And for some reason I wasn't carefully laying the colors down in stripes. Instead I was randomly applying it to pieces of the lattice. By the time I got to my cool orange I decided I need to do a wash of that color over the whole lattice in order to make it not look like a very sad rainbow. Suddenly it did what I hoped it would do -- create movement across the canvas and begin to break up the blocks of light toned colors. A happy day!