Battle 1 : mission acomplished

It's done! I'm gonna call this Rubber ducky joy of joys when I squeeze you you make noise, I can't remember the last time I had so much fun painting.



Lessons learned about opaques: they are much more easy to use than I thought, can enhance transparents and don't look dull at all even when used as thick as possible, they are really useful to correct mistakes.

This is a close up of the ear, I didn't notice that some foam should be covering it and couldn't lift the paint to a white paper so... just used some pro white and blue to form the bubbles over the remaining orange, I think it worked pretty well:



I WANT GOUACHE!!!

Links to the whole WIP: step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4

Ernie done, foam to go

I'm at that point where I wish I shouldn't have to paint that foam, maybe I could say it's a modernist approach and let that plain white shape there instead? hehehe I don't think so.

Other than that Ernie is done and rubber ducky too, plus I worked on the background adding a couple of layers of manganese blue nova and cobalt violet and am liking it better now. can't decide if it's done or not but I won't be touching it until I've worked on the foam, how on earth do you paint bubble bath?



My favourite moment so far has been adding the lamp black on his hair, I love black! at first I thought about working on it to add some volume but I kind of like it right now.

Links to the whole WIP: step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4

War of Opaques progress

Do you know when you are in the middle of a wash and the doorbell rings and you think "damn!"? Well, DAMN!!! and right after that The Hideous Turquoise Background of Doom happened, O_o



Somehow after the swatch I thought that it wouldn't harm to use turquoise in the background, it hasn't worked as planned, hmmm... will have to think how to fix that area.





Other than that I'm having lots of fun using opaques and mingling them with transparents, so far in this first painting it's going to be cad orange, naples yellow, something turquoise light, manganese blue nova and lamp black as my opaques, I'm loving them so far, you can get nice texture, the paint flows nicely and it's easy to control, no more fear to use strokes with LOTS of pigment, surprisingly they don't overpower other colors while mixing on the paper nor they get overpowered by others, they cover anything nicely and it's easy to build up volume with lights/darks = nice!, they make the transparent next to them glow, they dry darker than I expected though but that's not necesarily a bad thing IMO.

So far I've only find 2 cons on the colors I'm using:
1.- I use to layer yellow over the oranges I have to make them glow and it's a thing that doesn't work over opaque cad orange, it was easy to imagine but I had to try anyway (always wishful thinking)
1.- The turquoise, pretty color, nasty pigment to lift, grrrrrrr.... and I've been spraying water over my pics for years getting pretty textures but it hasn't worked AT ALL with that turquoise, my fault or the pigment's? I don't know yet.

Links to the whole WIP: step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4

War of Opaques begins

It's decided, the first attempt for may's study of opaques will be Ernie taking a bath with his beloved rubber duck, it seemed mandatory to do such a classic, and looks like a good choice to test some of the opaques I have and make them work together with transparents, the hard thing for me will be to use them trying to get advantage of their characteristics as opaques instead of dilute them to use them as any other transparent color.

I've done a couple of quick sketches and decided on the composition of the image already, yes, it's pretty rough and it's as elaborated as it's going to be, I don't feel like spending more time with the line work.





Links to the whole WIP: step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4

Is there something as too many colors?

This past sunday I've been making a chart of the colors I have to check which ones were opaques, we will be studying those at an online group and since I never do this kind of thing I thought it would be good to have a chart instead of relying in my memory so....

I've found that some of the colors I have look to me absolutely opaques but they are listed as transparent in the official color charts, so I must have done something wrong? lol

What is undeniable is that I do have more tubes than I need for sure, I used every single one at one point but in the end my urge to try new colors does leave me with a lot of small tubes that I don't really use at all.



My opaques run mostly among the blue/green/yellow range and a few that I don't often use, the examples of Carla O'Connor's paintings at the group made me want to go for figures in this project and inspired by Roger Cruz my gigglyinner12yearsold side wants to make some muppet show so super grover, cookie monster, Ernie & Bert, count von count... beware!