Taking on a new, larger project based on another very green Giverny photo. The good news is that I took it in person, which means I was at the stunning Giverny gardens with my beautiful wife – pretty ideal to say the least. The bad news is all that intimidating green.
Reference photo is pretty good, and it’s readily apparent how one can be lead into the photo.
I spent the better part of an hour tonight doing nothing but experimenting with mixing variations of greens, mostly using Permanent Green Light and Viridian Green, and testing how they change with the addition of various secondary colors – burnt siena, cad red, cad yellow light and medium, cad orange, and ultramarine blue. Staying away from pthalo green for now, but I’m happy with what the results are.
A couple weeks ago I got this painting started. After a quick reference drawing in my sketch book, I laid in very remedial base layers, emphasizing darks. This looks like total crap for now, but that was expected as the next session will build more value range and better greens to give it some life.
Canvas size is 24×18″, which is large for me. I’ve done this size a couple times before, but very basic stuff, so this will be different. I may also try to do some large chunks of this with a palette knife instead of a brush. I have a workshop in February with David Cheifetz and my experience with painting with a knife is very limited. Fingers crossed!
Art Bern 
Oh boy — this is going to be fun. You’re off to a great start, i think. I bought a 24 x 18 canvas the other day, and it seems HUGE compared to the other work i’ve done. But wow, exciting possibilities.
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