After painting a bit, I also found that the turpentine-mixed colours look dull, and then I realised that doing the whole picture well would take ages to get right because of all the plant leaves, kind of bit more than I can chew, or want to chew today.
Anyway eventually I wasn't into it any more and I stopped there. I didn't get to painting the bird, maybe another day.
Usually the paintings I do will dry within a week, but this new paper doesn't soak any oil/spirit at all.
One problem is that I'm not using turpentine, but another more eco-friendly spirit that also takes longer to dry. So I thought today I'll try turpentine again, in hopes it dries faster.
However turpentine really stinks; I had forgotten how much, and it also dries too fast while I'm painting, so it's not very pleasant. Maybe also because I'm not used to it.
Today I snapped a cute photo of the blue tits that come on my desk to get peanuts, and I tried painting it. But I got mildly annoyed by various things and stopped halfway through, and will just rant about them instead.
In January, I was out of the previous paper that I was using, and got a new block of Canson Figuras, on purpose for oil. I used that to paint portraits from Twin Peaks a month ago.
The problem is: they're still not dry!
My dad and I made a small bird feeder on purpose for my flat's French window (porte-fenêtre). It needed to fit on the small guardrail and not touch the rolling blinds next to it.
I added the awning and columns as decoration, and to try and prevent the pigeons from slurping all the seeds before the small birds can get a taste. Unfortunately the pigeons have telescopic necks that still allow them to reach the seeds close to the door.
Anyway there's still enough left for the tits :)
Yesterday and today I prepared and printed my holiday cards in lino. I tested making three colour layers and aligning everything :)
I'm happy with the result, but I found while printing that juste the yellow and blue looked more punchy than with the third layer.
The lettering is in the style of Dina Chaumont, the typeface of the city of Chaumont, close to where I'm from.
Today I painted a kitchen scene, a pumpkin (from my parents), my sourdough starter and some flour, fruits (from the supermarket), and cooking utensils. I'm happy about the laddle reflections and in general I think the painting looks quite realistic.
The colour tone that I did is very yellow and my phone camera didn't manage to make it look as strong as in real life, so I had to up the saturation and temperature by hand.
