Watercolor - Sunflower Field

This is a watercolor painting on Fabriano Artistico HP paper, 20"x16". I made my own Chromium Green Oxide paint from Gamblin pigment powder and used it on the leaves, stems and flowers. It is a very gritty pigment and tends to scratch the paper when brushing it on. It's very opaque and rather neutral colored, but it mixes well with yellows and blues and works well in glazes. I like the fact that it is easy to shape into fine details, and it doesn't tend to form hard edges.

I also used a lot of Terre Verte from Winsor and Newton. This color is also very useful for shaping fine details. It takes a lot of paint to take it to a dark value, so Terre Verte helps prevent accidentally making an area too dark while working out the details of a light-valued area (in this case, the palest areas of the leaves).

I used Daniel Smith's Primatek color Piemontite Genuine as the initial glaze for the sunflower centers. The color somewhat resembles Mars Violet; however, it is a bit richer in maroon and brown hues. It's very granular and easy to sculpt into natural looking 3D textural shapes.

Violet Rose Egg Tempera

Here is another egg tempera painting, 5"x7" on Ampersand Claybord, finished just yesterday. I painted the initial layers in mars violet and titanium white. When used straight, mars violet is very opaque and dark, so I was able to get the shadow areas very dark very quickly without the streaks that transparent colors tend to give. These shadow areas were darkened further with Daniel Smith's bloodstone genuine (I mixed egg yolk into the tube watercolor). The bloodstone mixed with titanium white made a nice bluish gray with hints of cool red, which I used for lighter areas of the petals. I also made much use of pyrrol red and quinacridone rose on the petals. The leaves have bits of several colors - viridian, prussian blue, quinacridone gold among others.