Purple Haze

I'm taking a workshop with Maggie Price this week! She is teaching for 5 days, but alas I can only take the class for the first two days, so want to make the most of it. But today was the first day. Maggie was there with her husband Bill Canright. The weather was not conducive to working outdoors, so we worked in the studio using our own photos as references.

It was definitely different for me. We had to use white Wallis paper, and then lay on an underpainting lightly with pastels, and then use turpenoid to make a wash of the colors. I've heard some teachers suggest that for the underpainting you should use complimentary colors to the final layers. But Maggie feels you should use colors similar to the finished layer, but very bright and vibrant versions.

As she puts it - if you use dull or muted colors for the underpainting it's hard to brighten up later. And also she reminded us that one way of making gray is to mix complimentary colors. So that's what she feels you don't want to use compliments for the underpainting. You are setting yourself up for a grayish hue to your painting.

So it was fun to try a painting, with her critiques. I actually did two paintings today, and this is the first of them. This scene is taken from one of my photos from Greece, looking out over the Gulf of Corinth from the seaside hotel I stayed at for a couple of days, just south of the city of Patras.