cristinrenee

Poor Checotah. I overdo it with all the painting Tuesday, but she's the one to suffer.

So, it was a good thing I had this canvas ready. The teacher did ask about a second canvas and I was able to pull it out and say I was all set to go. She complimented the composition and the sketch, too, which was very nice to hear. (She doesn't need to know how I angsted over the composition for two weeks, right?)

I was up early to finish the sketch and stayed up late to get as far as I did on the underpainting. I had the whole canvas covered at one point, though you'll see that's not how I left things...

Unlike Mermer's underpainting, I wanted to try doing this one as monochromatically as possible. I was using raw umber and yellow ochre. One of my biggest challenges was that I totally underestimated how warm the yellow ochre would make things and that it would "read" as a much darker value than I ever would have thought. I'm going to have to go back in and do a lot of fixing to cool areas and bring in higher values (brighter lights).

I spent close to three and a half hours on it Tuesday night, with only one break.

	Most of these pictures are to demonstrate why I find it really handy to look at black-and-white photos of my work in progress. It's easy to judge value within a hue, but I've found I'm pretty lousy at comparing values of different hues. Like this photo here, I really think the gold between the two big trees should be a higher value (lighter) than the tree trunk on the left. But... as soon as I put the color done, my gut said "Oh! Better check. I think you screwed up and these are the same value."
	And as soon as I looked at it in B&W, I saw that the gold bit looked exactly the same as the tree on the left. Woe.
	And I'm fussing around, looking back and forth at my inspiration photo and my painting through the camera's display screen.
	And flipping back and forth between color and B&W.
	Ah! Progress. Have lightened up the gold enough for there to be some value contrast between the tree and the ground.
	A little more progress...
	and a little more...
	checking the value...
	And it's looking pretty good.
	Yeah, I like it, although the darker tree trunk is going to have to be lighted up a lot.
	But I'd been painting for so long that by the time I got to Chickie's head, I felt like I was fighting to keep my eyes open. And I think I was using too big of a brush and too-wet paint. It didn't look bad. Wish I'd been together enough to take a photo. But then I sat back and her head looked like a pit bull head again. And when I tried to make small corrections, I started making things worse and worse. So. I had the canvas completely covered, and then I erased poor Chickie's head again. Poor dog. (I am so very pleased with the rest of her body though. It looks just like I'd imagined it. Just... I hope I can do her head.)
	And here's my palette at the end of the night. Not very pretty.