Sunday, 13-Mar-16 20:23:30 CET

Izabella 13 March 2016

It is Sunday 13th of March 2016 and I am on my way to life model painting session in Amsterdam. I has been some time since I went painting. The first Sunday I missed because I was on vacation to Sweden. When I was in Sweden I picked up the flu so the second Sunday I stayed at home sick. For my standards it has been a really long break.

Before the break I was thinking a lot on changing my palette layout. Somehow I cannot figure out a super-efficient way of organizing the palette. There are many possibilities. Right now I am thinking of putting the white in the middle of the palette and the other colors in a circle around the white. It is burnt sienna that spoils the simplicity. If I only had white yellow, red and blue then I would just have had these colors around the white. Now I have also burnt sienna. I think I will have it outside the circle or yellow, red and blue.

Another thing I have been thinking about is to have better light. For this I bought a daylight lamp that can be mounted on the easel. That is the good part. The bad part is that it is heavy and expensive.

So that is the situation on my way to Amsterdam today.

I am still coughing and sneezing. I hope it will go well.

I need to find a way to carry my things. Perhaps I can find a trolley for all my stuff? Working with the lamp was fantastic though. I had full control over the light.

The artists today were Jochem, Lotte, Luc and Saskia. There was also a young female artist from perhaps Hungary but I don’t know her name, yet.

The model was Izabella from England. This was the last session of three with Izabella so I did not have much to say about where I was going to get a place. The model was also a standup comedian, singer and what not and she had red hair and a lovely pale skin.

And how did the new palette layout work? Not bad actually. I placed white in the middle and yellow at 12 o clock. Then Red at 4 and blue at 8 o clock. Outside both red and blue I placed burnt sienna.

The white got really messy. But this way I could make green, orange and purple much easier. Green and purple are important for shadow tones on skin. I had a silhouette view of Isabel. She had one warm lamp behind her and all the other artists’ fluorescent lamps on the other side of her. She had a thin sharp line of illuminated contours. I worked on this feature in my painting. To make this extra visible I had to have a really dark background and for this I even had some lamp black. Normally I would use ivory black but I just grabbed some colors and the first black that came out of my paint box was lamp black.

So now I am on the train back to Almere and I feel satisfied with the result. I have my daylight lamp with me. My back hurts a little because I was standing painting today.

That’s it for now. Next week a new model.