I've worked out why I'm going nuts with this piece!
The obvious reason is that I have a bunch of work unfinished, and I want to get back to it all.

The other is that part of this unfinished work is the piece on my method of highlighting and shading. I learnt a lot about lymning (illumination) when I did research for other techniques of illumination when I was writing this piece, and as a result my own technique has gone a bit schizo.

The piece can't scan well at the moment. It's taped to a board - so I can put it off-balance in the scanner and get a shadow, or evenly balance it and have it a distance above the glass, which means a less clear image. I went for the shadow last post, the blurry image this post.



If you look at something like the cabbage leaf (the big green thing on the right in olive greens with a dark apricot centre, tho it looks red on the scan) you can see the tiny strokes that I've taking to doing with watery paint pretty clearly (by clicking on the image)
But the leaf opposite - for some reason it only worked by the 'soft blending' method I described in my piece.
And if you look at the stem of the pair of apricot and blue flowers near the bottom, there is dry brushing to shade the stem!

It's just 'happening'. I'm not choosing a particular method for each bit. It seems to be what's happening with my brush at the time. I just happen to be on the other end of it.

I want to re-work that leaf on the left that is soft blended. It doesn't look right. It should be the easiest element to paint, since it's simply an acanthus leaf, au'naturel, and I've certainly painted lots of them.

I removed the leaf to the left of the carnation that I was talking about last post, and patched over the area. Unfortuntaely the Doc Martens is coming up when I put the coloured wash over it, changing the colour and you can see the patch. *bang head against desk*. I'll think of something! Worst case, Kit can 'fix' the background on the scan by copying some other background over it in Photoshop, although I'd much rather have the original correct.

I think the dis-quiet I feel is because I'm going through an evolutionary process with my illumination technique as I paint this piece, as a result of the research I did and so it feels rather experimental and weird.

This is a good thing.

I really need to clean that ink from my scanner glass, don't I!

Master Giles de Laval's piece recently posted to scribes
(at http://www.sca.org.au/scribe/images/pel_scroll_large.jpg) is just to die for. Studying the image up close is really useful, as well as reading his essay at http://www.sca.org.au/scribe/masterpiece.htm

Especially interesting is his use of azilirin crimson to form the shadows on the blue. To quote from his essay :

"Rather than a simple dark blue, the shadow tone was based on alizarin crimson. Alizarin crimson laid over ultramarine is a painter's trick from the Gottingen Model Book later adopted by artists such as Titian, as it provides a richer and more visually recessive tone than dark blue, making it ideal for trompe-l'oeil modelling"