This is another copy of a printout of a nice painting by W. Pinkham.  I like this style.

When I arrived at class this week, I brought the printout of this painting that I was supposed to have done for homework last week. I never got to it. I was glad the instructor had set up a watercolor still-life for the other student and he was happy to allow me to do my own thing while the two of them painted together. He suggested I mix my colors first and then work across the canvas using my pre-mixed colors.  It took me half the class just to make six little blobs of color!

I go through this weird sort of paranoia when I first try to work.  I can’t see clearly and my heart races.  My hand shakes with my brush trembling as it nears the canvas. A couple of times the instructor came over to see my progress as I made myself more acquainted with the different paints, mixing colors for the background.  Some hues are opaque and are very bossy, while others are more transparent and let their influence be less obtrusive.  I still am learning the way complementary colors knock each other out.  I add the wrong color and instead of getting a nice blend, I get gray.  But, one of those gray “mistakes” turned out to be a lovely addition to the water line in my painting.

Eventually I won’t make mistakes with my color mixing, but that is probably going to take a long time.  I will run out of paint before I understand the way each hue works. Synthetic colors are often transparent, ground stone hues usually are very opaque and need to be used cautiously if you want just a hint of their color.  It’s all very exciting and terrifying to me.

Below I have posted a progress photo. It took three days to finish this piece.  I suspect it took about ten hours total.  Maybe more.