This is today’s work while teaching a workshop…so it is very limited but I am excited to see the ending already. I want to refresh the sky so that I can place the tree mass to overlap the finished sky. With the proper work, I should be able to imply a great deal of depth in the tree mass as it is silhouetted against the sky.
I also want to make the connection on the hillside where the bright teal hits the school bus yellow.. I need a transitional color (probably and soft or dirty cinnabar (the combination of the teal and the yellow with some dirtying pigment to allow the chromas to bleed into one another easily.
The mix I'd build toward: your teal + yellow in roughly equal parts, then knock it back with a touch of burnt sienna or raw umber — enough to gray it slightly without muddying it into nothing. You're looking for something in the olive/khaki family, warm-neutral, that can be dragged wet-into-wet along that edge so the chromas bleed rather than collide.
Workshop Day / The Patience of Wet Paint
Some paintings tell you immediately what they need. This one did — and then asked me to walk away.
It's a floral, built on a lavender field that functions more as atmosphere than background. The flowers aren't posed. They're discovered — warm russets and peach tones emerging from the cool ground like they've been there all along, waiting for the light to find them. The corn stalk anchors the left edge with a rougher, more declarative energy, which is exactly the counterweight the delicate blossom cluster needs.
The move I'm after is simple and non-negotiable: white blossom hard against ultramarine blue. Highest contrast in the painting. Everything else — the lavender field, the warm flower notes scattered through the middle, the gestural marks underneath — all of it becomes secondary to that one relationship. The eye goes there first. Then it earns the rest of the painting on the way back out.
But the paint is wet. So for now, it dries.
There's a discipline in that. The temptation in a workshop setting is to keep pushing, to resolve while the energy is high. But some decisions need a dry surface to land on. The ultramarine I want is rich and final. Putting it into wet paint would give me mud where I need conviction.
So I'm leaving it. And I already know what it's going to be.