Sea Shell Study - Color Pass

Sea Shell Study - 8x10" Oil on Panel

This is the third stage of the sea shell painting I have been working on. The first session I painted the open grisaille and the second session I painted the closed grisaille. This session I use a full color palette of colors that I had premixed.

I mixed up strings of yellow, orange and purple for the shell. For the cloth I mixed up a string of blue. Mixing up strings takes a bit of time but make the painting process so much more enjoyable as I do not need to think about color as much and I can focus on just painting. With the premixed colors, I still need to mix during the painting process, but only small adjustments to shift the value, hue and chroma as needed.

Of course I was making drawing adjustments all the way along. Even if I had done a drawing prior to starting painting I would be doing drawing adjustments but they would be much smaller adjustments. As I drew directly with paint for drawing, I found I was making much larger drawing adjustments than I normally would be, even in the color stage. I also found I had to work much harder on portions of the shell where there was very little value change yet there were several hue shifts, very tricky. I think this is where the drawing really becomes a huge value as you are able to really understand the form before having to understand how the color is behaving by the light.

All in all I learned a lot from this study and I really enjoyed the process. It will make painting a more finished painting so much easier (I hope!) and I am looking forward painting the rest of my seashells soon.

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Tracey Costescu Fine Art

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