Did You Really Believe Me?

Wednesday Evening

This was a busy and successful day!  I hope yours was, too.  David was off visiting his father (after some discussion, we decided I wouldn't go this time as they were meeting with a realtor) so I decided the rainbow painting had dried enough and was ready for another attempt. 

Surely you didn't believe I wouldn't put you through this again, did you?  

After circling the easel by doing the breakfast dishes and starting a laundry, I got to work on the painting.  Last week I laid down an undercoat by painting sky and clouds over the previous attempt at a rainbow (this was after Sharon had scraped away the annoying ridges made of dried paint).  For this attempt, I needed the surface painted last week to be pretty well on its way to being dry.  If it had been wet, today's paint would have blended with last week's and the distinction between cloudy sky and rainbow would be lost.  I wanted the sky to be visible through the rainbow as though the rainbow was tinted window. 

However, I did need a light coat of fresh paint over the sky where the rainbow would be so those rainbow paints would have a specific area to blend into without obliterating sky.  Sound confusing?  Let me explain.  I painted a very thin coat of white with an almost dry brush (meaning very little paint on the brush) as a path for the rainbow.  Then I added four stripes of very, very pastel color (for example, lots of white with the merest suggestion of red) and allowed them to fade out as they reached the point where I wanted the rainbow to disappear (I decided I didn't like the way is was going straight up and off the canvas even though that was the way things really were that day).   With a different, wider, dry brush, the colors were blended from the red to the violet.  While that wasn't as successful as it was with an earlier attempt (there was so little red and yellow that there's no discernible orange, for example), it did allow the paint to blend into the white.  Then I worked on blending either side of the rainbow into the sky.  This procedure had to be done several times until I was satisfied with the transparent look of the rainbow and the way it fades out at the top of its partial arc.  Because of the amount of white, this part of the painting is full of light.  AND the sky shines through!!!

My teacher declared it finished after viewing the slightly blurry photo I sent her. 

I finished my day by dancing a jig.