Loyola Park, Tree with May Green, NDG

Quick paintings are needed when the conditions call for it. In this case the sun was nearly setting, and it was getting frightfully cold and windy. I selected this location because the sun was coming over my left shoulder which is ideal for the shadows and to get light on your paper. Also, the sitting location was a good 5-6 meters from the walking paths which were quite busy at this time. People are crawling up the walls during the pandemic lockdown and the park and sidewalks are the only public place where people can go. They are going to ease the restrictions soon and maybe things will get back to normal.

Convenience mixes are paints made with two or more pigments by the manufacturer. I learned about it from reading MacEvoy's handprint.com website where he mostly derided the concept of buying a convenience mix especially for greens. Recently, I noticed that I always mix two colours together on my palette, a rich green (PG7) and a yellow (PY154) to make the colour of grass, a chartreuse (key lime) green. So today in the morning I squeezed those two paints out of the tube, about 5:1 ratio of yellow to green and stirred them up with a toothpick, then let them dry. My homemade convenience mix worked great in this painting, it really helped get those bright greens with less mess. Fittingly enough this mix is often marketed as May green.

Another mix I have been rethinking is the tree-bark colour. In this example the bark was a a purple-grey-brown with a purple shadow including shadows from a nearby fence, and a significant amount of greenish moss on the bark. From my testing, I found that red iron oxide (PR101/PBr7) with a rich blue, in this case french ultramarine, gave a nice rich tree-bark with one application. I had to blend in the purple shadows, and then when it mostly dried, I finished it with the greenish moss using May green and burnt sienna, and the black grooves in the tree with bloodstone genuine.

5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, May 1st ! 2020