I had some delicious orange-green paint with wax left over on my palette and I swatched it up on the surface with a palette knife where one of the grape clusters hangs on the grid. YUM.

I am set up to work observationally and from various, gridded, print-out versions. I like to work from multiple references as it keeps me alert to the fact that I am not trying to copy or render any one thing but rather to synthesize my experience on the painted surface in front of me.

My original Reg-Green Set here is a mix of Cad Red Medium and Quinacridone Red / Courbet Green and Phthalo Green- warm and cool options of both, with some mixed tertiaries in the center, and satellite mixtures surrounding.

This one swatch got me excited to go ahead and dive into this painting, and so spent some time creating new blobs of paint and adding wax to them.

My palette was missing lighter values, so I made a bunch of pastel colors for my whites- similar to having Gamblin’s “Radiant” line of hues, which are just intense pigments like Quinoacridone and the Phthalos with white already added to them. This way, when you reach for a light, you can reach for a peach or a pink or lavender or periwinkle or whatever is appropriate for the pile you are trying to lighten…