Red, orange, and frustration

Last year I had started a rainbow series of still lifes and had done Indigo and Violet. In April I went back to working on that series and completed Red and Orange, though they gave me some difficulties.

With Red I started with a gray-scale under-painting, bringing it to the point where it looked like a completed black and white painting. Then I started glazing on the colour, which was going ok except that it looked too purple. After a lot of glazing and nearly giving up, I finally got it the way I wanted.

When I started Orange, I thought I had learned something with Red, like not to make the under-painting too dark. This time I saved a picture of the completed under-painting. When I started glazing on the colour things just kept going wrong. I had to give up and start over with a fresh one and decided to skip the under-painting and go straight to colour. There was still some struggle with it, but I think it turned out ok.