Palette for Arches

No new painting updates today – been a busy week at work, so no play time in the studio. But in the spirit of blogging discipline I wanted to post.

To the untrained eye, this post could look like, well… vomit. But it’s actually the painful reality of painting variations of sand hues. Gotta love that ochre and gray mashup!

The base mix for the arch yellow/sand was ochre, white, a little raw umber, and a spec of cad yellow. The grey is a standard mash of equal parts ultramarine blue and burnt sienna. To move the range of yellow ochre around, I experimented with varying values of the gray mixture. Fun stuff!

Painting arches - first pass

My arm hurts! 30 arch columns drafted. Still a lot more to go, but the spacing and angles were the tricky part, so I’m glad that’s done.

The addition of the arches, including the overlay sketch, took 3 hours.

Sketching in the arches

I lack the skill to just paint the arches in, especially since I want the large, close ones to have good detail. So I opted to sketch in a few for starters. The ones further away won’t have the same detail, but will carry the burden of contrasting values to showcase the sunlight. Well, that’s the plan at least.