Halifax Blues

I love Halifax. Especially the houses, shingled and painted in cheerful colours, unlike our neutral places here in Ontario. The city has a personality quite unlike anything I've ever experienced before. It's worth a visit. I took tons of photos last time I visited. I took the reference photo for this painting on a sunny morning walk to get coffee.

Acrylic on 7x9 canvas board

I usually prime my canvas with a neutral ground, yellow ochre for landscapes, or burnt umber and white to make a light grayish brown. But today I tried burnt sienna, thinking that blue on top of reddish might work. This created a challenge I would never have imagined. Yellow does not work well on top of red. It is somewhat transparent. I ended up painting the yellow areas white, then yellow.

I painted pretty quickly tonight because I didn't get started until 10 pm. It took me until after midnight which accounts for this post being dated the 19th. But we did enjoy a great dinner of grilled italian sausages and potatoes. It was all I could do not to go to sleep right afterward.

Valuable Lessons Learned Today:

• Cadmium Yellow Light is very transparent. It becomes less transparent when titanium white is added to it.
• Payne's Grey is actually a very dark blue. I added white to it to make shadows. They were very blue. Adding a bit of Burnt Sienna made it more neutral and grayer.
• Try to paint before dinner time.