Week 8: Vase of Flowers by Jan Davidsz de Heem

{at the end of the day}

Hello,

Here is this week's progress on the Vase of Flowers. It was really a good day, I arrived to the National Art Gallery (NGA) right around 10:30am {10am is always my goal} even with the lingering affects of a bad cold slowing my morning down some.

I arrived to my gallery only to find that the easel was not set up, so while waiting for the easel to be delivered I had an opportunity to get to know the security guard in charge of the gallery. Once the easel did arrive I decided to tackle the queen anne's lace flower in the upper left corner of the composition.

{status at the beginning of the day}

The head cold I was recuperating from slowed my senses down some and in the long run it was helpful because I needed a slower more methodical approach to painting the queen anne's lace. I spent all of the morning working on it, scraping it down a few times when I would stray in value or scale some.

{queen anne's lace right before lunch}

After lunch I did some touch ups to the flowers and began to block in the stem some before setting about to complete the first pass over of the red sweet pea flowers {I think that is what they are} the blue hyacinth, and the faded pinkish/blueish berries above the tulip. The sweet peas will require some glazing to get the high saturated pinks while the others will need glazing to mute the colors.

The exercise ofcopying this painting has really improved my understanding of how versatile glazing can be. In some situations adding a glaze will heighten the chromatic saturation of a color while at other times you can use a glaze to obscure and mute the saturation of a particular object or an entire area.

{status at the end of the day}