New Painting 2

April 1: Here you see the initial pencil sketch and the first underpainting for the background. The color of the background underpainting may appear to be black or a very dark blue on many monitors; it's actually about 60% Cobalt Blue and 40% Cadmium Red, making for a deep, rich purple. This is the second new painting to start out based on a drawing on a napkin from the 80s.

April 13-14: After a couple of weeks of suffering with a really bad toothache, and a bit of travel, I'm finally back at the easel. The molar is gone (whew!) and all is right with the world. Here you see that I've started filling in and refining the forms with a somewhat darker palette than usual. That's because bright colors would result in way too much contrast against the very dark background. Even the greens in the April 14th shot are on the bright side and I may tone them down in the overpainting.

April 28: I finally got back to this one toward the end of April. I finished the underpainting on the 29th but I don't have a picture of that handy just now. Here you see all but the last couple of figures filled in.

July 7: This painting sat unfinished for a quite a while because I was working on Stickler by the Cup. Two weeks ago, I added a second and final layer to the background; mostly cobalt blue mixed with a little cadmium red and some extra cadmium red in wide, irregular streaks that almost but not quite blend in. It's hard to see those streaks in real life, much less online, but they're there. It took most of those two weeks to dry. Then I put a second coat onto all the forms over the past two days. I didn't need to adjust the colors as much as I did with Stickler, and this is a much smaller painting so the work went a bit faster. Now it's done.