Coffee Pot Study
23rd November 2006
Oil on Panel 7" X 5"
Continuing the series of ulramarine blue/burnt sienna studies, in this one I wanted to get a way from the more unmixed sienna of the hanging garlic painting, and explore the greys available from a mix of the two colours with flake white.
Ultramarine and burnt sienna make a very nice range of greys, ranging from cool to warm. This current series is really about exploring what can be done with a warm/cool contrast, so I wanted to see what would happen if they were used more subtly.
This coffee pot is becoming an old friend now. I've drawn it three times, and painted it at least six times. It makes a good subject for tonal studies, since I get to play with subtle changes on the main white of the body, and deep black on the handle and the top. It's also a good challenge, since the white shiny enamel has bright highlights which are easy to loose if the overall light block gets too light in tone.
It's interesting to compare this one to the raw umber version I did a couple of weeks back. You'd think that only using ultramarine and burnt sienna would be limiting, but if you choose the right subjects, i.e. largely monochrome ones, there's a world of subtlety to be found in the greys that those two colours can produce. I may have only added one colour to the palette, but the dynamic range available to me both in terms of colour and tone seems to have increased many times over. The two colours together can make a near black, which appears to be much darker in tone than neat raw umber. I've tried to keep to the warm shadows and cool lights of the hanging garlic with this one, but without being quite so obvious about it.