An attempt to copy a painting by Larine Chung, found on Will Kemp’s page about choosing a basic colour palette. I was impressed by the effect created by just three colours (ultramarine blue, burnt sienna and titanium white) in Larine Chung’s original. I used ultramarine blue, burnt umber, a little azo yellow and titanium white in the Duo Aqua oils.

The handle was the hardest, with the whole three-dimensional appearance being easily thrown off with just a little paint in the wrong place – I still don’t think I got the light quite right, and the alignment of the spout and the handle seems wrong. And I haven’t captured that beautiful luminous glow of the porcelain in the original.

I used a small fan brush to do some of the blending, and found how easy it is to pollute the darks with lighter paint. See Mark Carder’s video on just this problem.

More experiments with oils, getting to know their properties and how they behave. I wanted to get away from using an on-screen photo as a reference, but painting the bookshelves in the corner of the room presented the problem of continually changing light. Not only did the illumination in the corner of the room change during the few hours spent painting but the painting itself was in turn lit by overcast clouds, direct sunlight and sunlight through a drawn curtain – not ideal, but it underlined the importance of consistent lighting when attempting to get any sort of accurate colour.

I started with a perspective sketch and spent some time with a pencil held at arm’s length to get the proportions right. The various mistakes (such as the angle of the top of the books on the lower shelf) were going to be corrected the next day, but the paint had already become tacky and unworkable. Maybe the way round that is to let it dry even more before correcting, or use a slow drying medium so the paint stays workable for days.

I’d bought some low-tack masking tape to hold down the acrylic paper, hoping that would cure the problem of the paper ripping on removal. If anything, this was worse than the masking tape bought from the DIY shop. Perhaps I need to rethink the whole painting on paper technique.