Hot times in the land of the lemon sunset

Over the years I did a series of paintings called The Lemon Sunset, which featured a dystopian future filled with crumbling cities, underground dwellings, and strangely shaped apartment buildings. Many of my paintings work along this theme of a distant future, a surrealist world perhaps. In this painting, a bright orange sun illuminates a plume of smoke with a prominent tree stump in the foreground.

The new colours I was testing here included the cadmium red and cadmium yellow hues from Daniel Smith company. They are truly great colours, and they do not contain any actual cadmium (hence the word hue in the names). Unfortunately I realized too late that these paints contain nickel compounds which are also toxic to the environment. So I pulled them out of my regular use palette and put them in a bag with the other toxic paints like cobalt and coppers. I used bloodstone genuine (also by Daniel Smith) for the outline and the granulation effects, luckily that one is not toxic and is now part of my regular palette.

5 x 5 cold press, watercolour, February 2020