Showing posts with label toy mice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label toy mice. Show all posts

15.8.05

When painting goes bad.

I'm trying to juggle two publishing briefs with my 'Summerlands' work. The briefs take priority, but I'm managing to sneak in an hour or so for myself. Yesterday I almost wrecked a painting by not testing out my colours beforehand, which is the danger of rushing things. I thought I'd give the 'Tin Mice' a fairground/rock candy feel, by using pink, yellow and green. Here I've added a gamboge yellow band to Mother Mouse. It looks too garish and I instantly swashed it down with clean water and soaked up as much of it as possible.

I tried a deeper pink next - this was better, though in this instance it is too dense and again, I mopped it until it faded to a respectable pale rose.

Next mistake was to paint the rivets with indigo. It looked - wrong. By now I realised that the colour scheme was going to be extremely limited...


So I made them - pink. Again.


Once it was painted up, I had my usual panic...will it be any good? I don't like it! But I got stuck in with the pencil work, which always brings the colours up, and managed to rescue what was almost a bit of a horlicks.

Tin Mice