Watercolor on CP 140lb Arches, 9x12." Reference photo is another vintage one, coming from the State Library of New South Wales . This is something that I haven't done in a while, a grisaille made only with blue and orange pigments. Blues and oranges, being complementary colors, "cancel" each other out and make shades of gray. I was first introduced to this interesting method of almost monochrome painting in a class I took from Helen Shafer Garcia (here is the painting that I did there). While I'm not very much into black and white (part of the reason why I never quite liked drawing with graphite or charcoal), this is a special kind of black and white. You can see areas that are more orange or more blue, especially if the pigments were mixed on paper, like in this painting. I wanted an overall sepia feeling here, so the oranges are dominating.
You will understand what I mean when you look close at this closeup of my favorite section of the painting:
Ah the wonderful granulating cobalt blue! :) The other paints that I used were ultramarine blue, quinacridone burnt orange and quinacridone sienna (my favorite orange at present time).
You might have noticed that my portraits-a-day are not quite a portrait every day : /. It is not so because of a lack of desire or inspiration, I have plenty of that. It turns out that the older my son gets, the less time I have. And I thought it was supposed to be the other way around...I think I'll be glad if I can finish this project in a year.