Yesterday I kicked off an abstract painting. I put on some masking tape and some…
Mercury
Today’s planet is Mercury, sharing its name with the messenger of the Roman gods and therefore deserving of a pair or wings. For the three colours today, I put aside the cheat code supergranulators and picked Winsor red, Winsor blue green shade and Indian yellow as my three colours as they could give me a decent planet and some interesting dark colours for the background sky. So this is in the key of orange cool. Titanium white and white gouache made late appearances (a common theme for this planet based series of paintings) but no other colours were harmed in the production of this painting.
So after putting down an initial drawing and starry spatter (and not managing to remove all the spattering from inside the planet shape) I painted in the sky. I deliberately made the sky bluer ahead of the planet and yellower behind with a bit of red here and there. As well as helping suggest movement, this helped contrast the planet against the background later on, with a sunny side against the blue sky and a dark side against the yellow. I added loads of salt behind the planet and a tiny sprinkling everywhere else.
Then it was on to the planet. This was pretty straightforward, although I did put in three layers of primary colours. The left side was mainly yellow, with some red introduced further to the right and some blue in the right and underneath, and the three mixed to a near black on the shadow side of the planet. I stabbed in lots of spots because Mercury is pock marked with loads of meteor holes.
For the wings, I started with a watery neutral mix of the three primaries with individual primaries charged in. It took me a while (and maybe three layers) to get this right. I thought too much white paper was showing, so went over everything again with a neutral colour and charged in more primaries. At one point I added some shadowy detail marks in a blackish mix of primaries. I made the near wing more detailed by having one mark per feather, at least for the middle and most extreme bits of the wing; for the further wing I included less detail.
As a finishing touch, I lightened the leading edges with the titanium white trick, putting on watery paint and dabbing it off with kitchen paper. And I added some white highlights to some of the feathers in gouache. And that was me done.
And that all resulted in a decent painting. Just as with all these planets so far, the two big stars are the sky background and (at least in my opinion) the creativity and imagination. The salt does a great job in this one of suggesting movement and I also like the colours in the near wing. I just worry a little bit about whether the colours in that near wing fit in with the rest of the painting. They’re the same colours as everywhere else but a bit brighter and less saturated than the muddy colours everywhere else. But that’s just me being picky. This is good enough to go in the shop window.
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