I Regret Being Cheap and Caution

Cinnamon Cooney, of the fantastic lip tutorial, recently put up a how to on painting an old copper background which I loved. Here, you'll love it too.



I decided to experiment with it and since I wasn't sure how my experiment was going to work out, I used my very cheap school grade paint and acrylic paper.

 Step One: Putting on burnt umber and phthalo blue with a big brush.

The elementary school burnt umber wasn't bad but the phthalo blue was just. . . wrong. And opaque. Who ever heard of opaque phthalo anything? Who ever heard of the word 'phthalo' to begin with? The people who do not want to say 'phthalocyanine', that's who.

Step Two: Draw outline of pitcher with charcoal pencil and paint around it.

I'd like to point out how well the drawing turned out considering I can't draw for shit as you can see by how many times I had to draw the belly of the pitcher before I got it right. Seriously, like three or four tries just to get an outline of a pitcher! Why am I here? Why do I even pretend I can art when I can't draw a simple pitcher?

Step Three: Get over myself and add layers.

With a sea sponge I layered on not cheap phthalo green and yellow oxide. Only because there was no phthalo green with the grade school paint and the two yellows were like lemon and sunshine yellows. You know, for painting rainbow unicorns.

 Step Four: Use more yellow oxide and gold to layer on more, especially in the highlighted parts, then make a thin wash of white to highlight some more.

 The End.

Note also how funky the lighting is in my painting room. I face a north-facing window where I can look into my neighbor's hallway window if they ever do anything exciting. Which they don't. I got a pretty harsh 100 watt overhead LED bulb which is a giant improvement over the dim, dumb 40 watt fluorescent that was there until a few days ago. And last, but not least, a goose-necked light clamped to the table that I use to shine on stuff I can't see because I'm blind.

The upper left hand corner of this painting did not change from one photo to the next. Yet the time of day, the source(s) of light-- even the angle of the camera changed the colors a lot. I'd like to take it outside to photograph it in natural light but there is a snowpocolyps abrewing and I'm not going out there.

No matter which light it is in, I like the way it turned out but since I painted it on paper instead of canvas I cannot hang it in my home, I can only tape it to my craft room wall like a lovesick teenager.