Like my wallet had a drain

[avram]

Man, can I spend money! Took $60 out of my account this morning, and by the evening it was almost all gone and I had to take out more for grocery shopping. Let’s see:

• Chinese food (for breakfast, while doing laundry)
• A tube of indigo watercolor (Winsor & Newton, since M. Graham doesn’t make an indigo; Winsor & Newton is fucking expensive, so I got a teeny 5ml tube)
• A couple of books at The Strand: Techniques of the World’s Great Painters, which has me thinking a lot about glazes, and John McPhee’s Irons in the Fire, because it’s a John McPhee book and it was just five bucks
• A venti steamed cider at Starbucks
• Some comics at Forbidden Planet: Fight for Tomorrow #1 and Happy Endings, an anthology paperback from Dark Horse
• Twenty dollars worth of groceries (chicken fillets, turkey patties, grapes, other stuff)

So now I’m experimenting with glazes and skin tones in acrylic. I’m starting with a brown underpainting, ’cause DaVinci used to. I’ve discovered that burnt sienna with some titanium white in it is a good part of the way to a tanned fleshtone, so I’m using that for a ground.

Comments

Art stuff

[jonbaker.livejournal.com]

>starting with a brown underpainting, 'cause DaVinci used to

And El Greco, and others in that period. When I visited my brother in Chicago years ago, I went 'round with him for a day of classes at the Art Institute. In the "Materials and Techniques" class, the professor talked about the "value underpainting" that a lot of the Renaissance people used. Mitch used that technique in making a reproduction of a small El Greco that hangs in the Art Institute (a guy with a scraggly beard sitting kinda crunched up). If you want to talk to him about it, I could give you his email address. Not that he's done much art in the past few years.

Jon Baker