This week for the Firday live session, we'll be having a go at this intensely high chroma poppy.
These colours are not easy to reach with paint! It will REALLY hlp you if you have permanent orange in your paint box.
If the most intense orange you have is cad orange, you may get close but you’ll probably struggle to get the chroma quite as high.
Of course, as well as attempting to get those very high chroma light and shadow colours, I’ll be trying to work a little poetry and life in this as it gets translated from the reference into paint.
I’ll be starting by laying in the background colours, then wiping out the area for the flower.
It’s going to be necessary to remove as much paint as possible to get the chroma high enough there - I’ll be working on an oil-primed Ampersand Gessobord panel (I add the oil prime myself), which has a slightly slicker surface than the acrylic prime they come with, less absorbent. That makes it easier to wipe back more paint.
But it will be perfectly possible to do it on an unprimed one too, just as they come - you might need a touch of solvent to really get all the background colour removed when you wipe out the area for the poppy.
Materials
Surface: 10 × 8 inch Oil primed Ampersand Gessobord panel (will work almost as well without the oil prime)
Brushes: Hog bristles (I like Cornelissens), sythetic flats for the poppy itself and for softening, silicone spatula for the background. Possibly a pan scrub too!
Paints:
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Lead white (titanium will work if you don’t have lead)
Cad yellow
Permanent orange (cad orange a distant second)
Quinacridone rose
Green gold
Transparent red oxide
Raw umber
Ivory black
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The app I use to investigate the colour is called ChromaMagic. You can find it on the Apple and Google Play stores, and there is also a Windows version. It's very inexpensive and extremely useful! If you struggle at all with judging values and colours, or with mixing, this is a great tool to help you calibrate your estimates by giving you immediate feedback on how close your guesses come.
You can get the Munsell value scale - which allows you to translate values from the app directly to your painting - from Paul Centore on Ebay here, also very inexpensive: https://www.ebay.com/itm/223003792036
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If you're interested in learning with me, you can see the online art school I run here: https://courses.learning-to-see.co.uk/bundles/paul-foxton-online-art-school