Paintings of France, Italy and Beyond

A two-fer; Lake Como Paintings

19 03 2008

My schedule has been NUTS lately so unfortunately my blog has suffered a bit of benign neglect. Still alive and kicking and painting, however. Here’s something I thought I’d try to see if I might be able to save a little money on paint. A lot of times when I paint I can mix too much color, (which I still think is far better than mixing too little).

These mixtures can be reused of course, especially if the subsequent painting needs similar hues. But I’m not always good about consciously planning my subjects like that. So here’s a conscious effort to get two paintings going at the same time with color mixtures that relate to each other:

lake como paintings by Jennifer Young

The key will be not to just lazily use what’s already mixed if it doesn’t really suit what I’m painting. In hindsight it might have been better to start one large painting and one small painting instead of two rather ambitiously sized pieces, (they are both 30×40″.) But I guess I was feeling cocky when I started these!

While I did the transparent color block-ins one after the other, what is happening as I proceed is that I am still focusing on one individually, with an occasional switch-off when I need a change. I don’t really know if I’m conserving much paint, but it does keep things interesting. In case you can’t tell what these are, the subject matter for both pieces is Lake Como, Italy. The painting on the left will be a more fleshed out version of the little watercolor painting I did for my last charity auction.