Bledlow Poppy

I painted over the sky, the trees and the orange background fields using the same colours as before.

I painted in the poppy using cadmium red (the eleventh colour so far), rose dore and (just for the hell of it) some shadowy French ultramarine.  I added some wet into wet sepia in the middle – I can confirm that sepia really doesn’t run everywhere when used wet into wet, so it’s place in my palette is justified.

And then I tried lots of ways of tidying up the sepia ink.  I painted all over the foreground using the same colours as before.  Didn’t work.  I tried using the opaque cadmium yellow (twelfth colour) to mask it out.  Didn’t like it and wiped most of it off.  I added some extra sepia grasses.  Whatever.  I poured on granulation medium. Didn’t work.  Tried spreading granulation medium with a sponge.  Didn’t work but I accidentally smeared off a bit of poppy and that looked good.  A lucky accident at last.  And then I wet all the sepia ink, added some huge salt crystals, poured over lots of table salt and left it to dry.  Scraped off all the salt.  It’s not really worked.Oh, and while the salt was drying, I spattered over some titanium white (thirteenth colour), cadmium red and French ultramarine because I had nothing to lose.The colours in my palette weren’t used are cerulean blue, cobalt blue, Payne’s grey and light red.  Four plus thirteen makes seventeen but there are only sixteen pans in my palette.  Remember that rose dore isn’t in my palette yet.

The plus points coming out of this one are the poppy, the orange field and rose dore starting to show its true colours.  The painting itself is rubbish and will never sell.  I’m starting to think, though, about gathering together all my worst paintings, tearing out the best bits and reassembling them into a best-of-the-worst collage ensemble.

Edit (May 2020) I’m now doing just that.