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Thank-you Marina and Sharon.
Marina - I am pleased to have this painting likened to a Chardin, whose paintings I really respond to because of the rich, hearty paint and the wonderful clear-sighted crafting of his pieces to their never-failing perfection. After I did this painting, which I did because I felt that if I was painting for myself then I would do just what I wanted (despite it's looking much more traditional and old-fashioned than is usually accepted by the contemporary who's who in art crowds). You just can't deny the mastery of painters like Chardin and Velasquez and the relevance it still has for painters who love to paint, and I simply wanted to paint like that with this one.
My palette is usually limited to what I have left in my paint box, but I tend to use a lot of this Torrit Grey from Gamblin which is a mix of all the left-over paint from the year's paint-making. It comes out around environmental day and is free with any purchase of Gamblin oil paint. I use Gamblin a lot because it seems to be less toxic than the other makes, and with a young child around I want things to be as safe as possible. For this reason I also don't use turps or anything else. Just the paint. Torrit Grey is really good for my shadows because it is a kind of anti-colour, but rich because it has all the pigments in it. When I run out of Torrit Grey I usually make my own from ultramarine or a black and a cadmium orange and a brown like raw umber and perhaps a cerulean blue and then quite a bit of titanium white.
I usually use a lot of cadmiums although I do use the hues and not the pure stuff because of toxicity issues. I found that cadmium orange and white make a great pink flesh tone and works well with the torrit for making the light and the shadows in the flesh. I usually put a cadmium of some sort in the grey depending on what I see in the shadow. So this, I suppose, is my basic palette at present. I do use a lemon yellow when called for and cadmium orange and black scumbled on in the background and then some of the flesh tone in the background too, with a bit of cerulean or ultramarine blue to make it recede. And violet sometimes helps with that too. It's all a bit of an experiment to see what works the best.
Sharon - I am getting up the guts to do a really burlesque painting. Something Goya-esque. (But what would people think!? How unfeminine!)
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