Mid January Reflection – Beyond Triadvent

Completing a challenge is a satisfying feat, but leaves the question, “What’s Next?” I have been thinking for quite a bit about what I learned from December’s Triadvent challenge which I extended to complete the 31-day month. I came away with quite a few little tidbits for myself. I think my top three are as follows: 

1. I solidified a few pigments in what I consider to be my standard palette and deepened my understanding of why I keep them there.
2. I saw improvement in my ability to paint light into a scene and made note of how I did it.
3. The repeated practice with perspective drawing (or direct painting) is starting to pay off.

First, my palette. I am a constant waffler about the pigments I carry in my 14-well Art Toolkit. I know I could split them to include more, but I don’t like the mini pans for my brushes; they make it too hard to get a brush filled with paint without really digging in with the point of the brush or making a mess of the surrounding colors. Plus, painting with just three colors on a daily basis during Triadvent reminded me that 14 colors is really more than enough to be able to approach pretty much any scene I will encounter on my travels both locally and afar.

This is a pretty standard selection for me, but with a couple of updates and affirmations since Triadvent. It’s a basic split primary to start with a mix of granulating and transparent pigments, additional yellows, blues, and a convenience green, since I paint a lot of foliage, a couple of earths, a granulating violet and a dark neutral. My most recent palette updates to get to this one were nothing drastic, but Triadvent helped me make a few nagging decisions and come to a couple of new realizations. The most helpful decision was that removing quin gold, which I used to carry religiously, was the right thing for me. I can mix it from PY150 and PR101,  and I have typically added more of either or both of those into greens even when I started with quin gold as a convenience. Plus that opened up a slot for my greatest realization: a warm yellow like new gamboge or permanent yellow deep is essential for me. It mixes great foliage greens, even if I am just enhancing my starter convenience green, and is the key to a vibrant orange mix, but it truly shines (pun intended) for painting light, both sunlight and light from windows at night in a way that cooler or medium yellows like Hansa yellow medium can make the light look harsh.

I also gained some clarity about the way the various colors on my palette play together. For example, I have never really been able to articulate why I keep a violet on my palette when I can mix it. I was reminded that I love the olives and rusty and violet browns that I can make quickly with it, and that the granulation adds a texture that I prefer in mountains, forests, and the shadows of foliage. It warms up my choice of indigo, which leans green, to make a terrific black with PR101 as well. While I sometimes like the separation I get from my magenta and cobalt or ultramarine blue mixes, sometimes I want the violet to stay intact itself. And it helps me make a pinker magenta from quin rose which I see as a more versatile color for the magenta slot in my palette. Violet justified! Here’s a sample of some of the mixes I am able to make with the convenience colors I keep handy.

Painting light has been a tough learning curve for me. It’s funny how one can learn something, then consistently forget to apply it. At some point last year I realized that I needed to put down the glow of light first AND be sure not to paint over it too much, crowding it out. When I felt that the selected triad would lend itself to it, I chose a night scene to paint, and that helped me a lot. It also translated well, IMHO, to my work with shadows. Here are two night scenes from Triadvent in both of which I painted the light sources first, followed by a daylight sketch that I did just the other day.

In each, I laid down the yellow first, layering over or around the light sources. Lots of growth to come, but I am starting to see how it works.

Perspective continues to be an ongoing challenge, but like other subjects, I keep choosing scenes that help me grow. My greatest accomplishment that Triadvent assisted with is that I am more comfortable drawing or painting directly without first doing a pencil sketch to be erased. Sometimes it means going over lines to make corrections, but…it’s a sketch, not a finished piece of work to hang, so I go with it. Here’s a loose sketch where what my eyes initially saw was not what was there, hence a few extraneous lines coming from the top of the building to the street.

I truly believe the best part of any challenge is the sense of accomplishment one gets from completing it. However, not far behind are those things that arise sometimes well after the challenge is completed, those that bring the “Aha!” moment, the realization that I’ve reached or at least made significant progress with a desired goal. Knowing that I got there because I stuck with a challenge, pushing through when it was hard or just plain tedious, and continued to make it an opportunity for growth is super satisfying. I feel proud of the accomplishment  and I think that’s okay. Recognizing what I have learned or gained from a particular challenge causes me to continue to want to get better and to seek yet another challenge to help me do it.