Anyway, a week or so ago I was brave and finally got the acrylics out, regardless of whether or not I would have time to do a painting with them from start to finish. I thought it best to paint while Alexander was awake as sleeptime is just too uncertain. After the success of the banana watercolour painting I thought painting at breakfast again would be a good bet. He has a pretty good level of patience to sit in his highchair, eat fruit and muffins and watch me paint.
And here is the 'fruit' of my labour (I guess that could also be a title applied to Alexander!). It is a tangerine, painted in acrylics into my A6 Moleskine sketchbook - amazing what this little Moleskine can have applied to its pages. I really have been thinking a lot about a holiday to a Spanish island and so this little tangerine with the sunlight (or as much of the sunlight as makes it in through my kitchen window in March) seemed to be a little dream of warmer climes. I think the buff titanium and olivey green background feel pretty reminiscent of continental summers.
Unfortunately there are a few bits of it that I've messed up. The tones on the shaded side of the tangerine are a bit clunky and the stalks are too. I had actually got it looking how I wanted it and then decided I would just add a little more at which point Alexander squeaked that his patience was running out and I just blobbed a load of paint on without checking that I'd managed to mix the colour up to match what I'd already been using. Oh well. There is always something. A painting is never really finished. I'm sure no artist is ever 100% happy with the result.The black lines are because I was painting over a scribbled on page in the Moleskine and didn't manage to cover them quite.
