Issa 26 March 2017

It is Sunday 26 of March and I am on my way to a life drawing session. This time it is not a nude female but a dressed man Issa. It is the second time I paint him.

I just witnessed an elderly woman on the platform being addressed on her smoking outside the smoke area. Her excuse was that she had always been doing it like so. That is an interesting excuse indeed. Because I always did it wrong I am right in what I am doing so I will just continue to do it. Lady had eight meters left before she would be in the smoking zone. Eight meters. That is close! Not.

Today the weather is nice indeed but it is still a bit chilly in the air. Actually, I went to Amsterdam yesterday together with wife and son. We went to an art store and I bought brushes and paint and also an Arches aquarelle paper block. Last year in January/February I started using the coarse Arches paper. It has the orange cover paper. Nice paper. We had a workshop at the aquarelle club from an Aquarellist Jan Min and he used that Paper. From then I used it all the time.

The issue with brushes has come to some kind of solution. The pig's hair brushes from Van Beek in Amsterdam is what I prefer. I buy nr 10. It is not so big brushes but for the size of panels, I am using, they work fine. If I worked on bigger panels I would buy bigger brushes.

The thing with the pig's hair brushes is that they curl up after a while when working with water, as I do since I use water soil able oil paint. It is fine though because if I got a couple of extra brushes then I can take the next brush and the next.

Now the painting session is done. The model was Issa again. I painted Issa from another view today. One problem was that I made the nose too long and later I had to nudge it into position.

Until now I painted with cobalt blue but today I had my new tube of ultramarine blue and I was surprised that it mixed very well with burnt sienna to make dark colors. For aquarelle, I knew it a long time but here I missed it somehow. I got this tube because they did not have cobalt blue in a big tube but ultramarine they had and when I read the ingredients I noticed that this tube had one pigment. We talked about pigments in colors at the studio and I think it was Maroesja who said that the fewer pigments the color have the easier it is to mix the color with other colors.

The artists were Tom, Saskia and another lady I have not seen before.

The session started one hour earlier today because Saskia had to go to a birthday party. Also that and it was the first day of daylight saving time.

In today's painting, I also used ivory black. I had to have really really dark colors in the shadows. Issa was really dark.

When the session was over I rolled in the dirty brushes. It will be challenging not to forget cleaning the brushes when I come home.