Peony Redux

Peony, acrylic on 12 X 16 in. canvas

If you are thinking 'deja vu', you might be right. I did a painting of this peony in pastel a while back and you may have seen it in a previous post. Now that I am learning to paint with acrylic paints I decided to give it another try. I painted this with four colors: Hooker's green, alizarin crimson permanent, titanium white and a touch of cadmium yellow medium in one of the green mixes. Well, technically Hooker's green is a mixture of other pigments, but let's not quibble about it. Now that I am learning a little about color theory, I used the complement of red, green (in this case the Hooker's green), to darken the alizarin crimson for the deepest shadows.

I painted this over a gray colored ground. I had read a suggestion online to use the paints left over from a previous session for your next painting's colored ground. The idea appealed to me because I could use the extra paint rather than flushing it down the drain, which is bad for the plumbing and the environment. If you saw my last post, you know that the painting was quite colorful. But again, as I am learning about colors, when you mix tints of opposites on the color wheel, you get a shade of gray. Hence blue + orange, yellow + purple, red + green and so on all mixed together ends up in a nice neutral shade of gray.