A recipe for grey and some great news

The colour choices I make for a particular painting or sketch are most often intentional, depending on what I am trying to convey. If it’s a very cold and snowy day, I will likely choose cool blues and purples. If I’m painting in a tropical place, I will probably use lots of yellows and bright greens or oranges. But occasionally, the colours I choose are based on some unplanned disaster that happens after refilling my paint wells. In this case, it was from a runny tube of Naples Yellow that I probably should not have used.

It was an old tube of paint — these are usually hardened and need to be trashed — but when I squeezed it, it still seemed to be moist so I optimistically filled my paint well with it. At first glance, I could tell it was too runny but I was hoping it would eventually congeal. You can see from the photo what it looked like at that point. It eventually oozed its way across my palette, infiltrating a good part of neighbouring colours as well as my mixing area.

But enough about the mechanics of it. I needed to use it up so it’s in a good part of this scene that I painted last week in Hudson, Quebec. It was a grey day to begin with, and I was painting at the end of the afternoon. The sky still had hints of brightness so I started by pre-wetting the sky with Naples Yellow and adding some blue/greys on top of that. I used it for the first wash on the house at the left, as well as in pretty much every grey I mixed after that. Since this Winsor & Newton Naples Yellow has some white in it, it will grey down everything you use it with. So the vegetation is grey, the trees are grey and the grey houses — still grey. And now that I’ve used up pretty much all of it, it will be off to the store for me to get some fresh pigment.

And now for the great news…

I am very thrilled and extremely honoured to be part of the lineup for the next Urban Sketchers Symposium in Toronto in August of next year. As a proud Canadian, I did a little happy dance when the location was announced a few months ago. After years of travelling all over the world to these events, it is so exciting to have sketchers visit us here. If you’re thinking of participating, have a look at the full schedule here. Hope to see you in August!