Woman With Cowlick Holding Rose; Woman Holding Rose 2

 Painted this morning, from life.

The top painting is oil on 16"x20" canvas.

The bottom painting is oil and oil pastel on 12"x16" canvas.

It was overcast this morning when I started the top painting.  Just about an hour later, the sun had come out, just in time for the bottom painting.

 Both of these started with underpaintings. The top painting had some light blue and some yellow and burnt sienna acrylic paints rubbed on the canvas first. 

The bottom painting has a canvas that was started in oil pastels a couple of months ago at Rutamaya, so the background that shows represents the walls there, with some oil paint added on top.

What I had on my palette for the top painting was titanium white, ivory black, cadmium yellow light, cadmium red light, and alizarin crimson.  Basically, a version of the limited Zorn palette, which I've been using lately for my paintings.

For the bottom painting, I added a little ultramarine blue to the palette.

The model was actually wearing a simple black knit hooded pull-over.

Exercises with the Zorn Palette

These are oil paintings on canvas, each 12"x16" and each done with the Zorn palette (except on the right, it looks like I may have picked up a little ultramarine blue at the end and put it on the hair and maybe some bits of cadmium yellow, also at the end), painted around 2006. The painting on the left is a self-portrait, done while staring in a mirror (and, no, I don't literally look like that, though I certainly painted what I felt at the time); the painting on the right is my version of a color copy of a work by an artist unknown to me. (This was an exercise from my then teacher, John Paul Thornton.)

The Zorn palette, named after a turn of the century (19th to 20th) Swedish painter, consists of white, ivory black, a yellow and a red (so I was told). I think I used yellow ocher and cadmium red, as my yellow and red on the copy of the unknown painting; I think I used alizarin crimson as my red on the self-portrait.

What you will quickly discover with this palette is that colors are relative. Your black and white mixes will look blue-ish, and your yellow and black mixes will look green-ish. If you take your black and white mix and mix it with your red, you will get something purple-ish, and so on. You can get a lot of beautiful colors from mixing these four colors in varying proportions.

In trying to re-construct when these were painted, I googled this wonderful artist, John Paul Thornton, whom I was lucky enough to learn from when he taught at the now closed Fine Artists Factory in Pasadena. His blog is aptly called Art and Courage; apparently he will have a book, available in June, also called Art and Courage. If you are interested in learning from a great teacher, I recommend checking it out. If it is anything like his in-person lessons, it will be well worth looking for.