Step 2 and 3 of the new painting

Okay.  So today I put a heavy wash over the brilliant underpainting of red orange, plum and magenta.  Today's wash consists of white, cerulean blue and ultramarine blue.  This is the sky that will be behind the leaves (of course).  Even though not much sky shows through it's nice to do this first so you don't have to add the sky later as an after thought. Notice I'm careful to let the underpainting show through because I want the redish hue to remain as the underpainting of the green leaves and green parrots.  You know the complimentary color of green is red.  So this will give the painting life by allowing the red to barely show through.  I'm also going to do another underpainting on top of that.  And I haven't even gotten to the drawing of any objects.  Now you can see why my paintings take such a long time.  Yes, it does take a lot of patience to go through this and it's hard when I want to start on the beautiful parrots!

I've been using this method for about 20+ years.  I was always a "get it done" artist before and this was good discipline for me to make myself do.  It just pays off to do the outlying areas of the painting before you get to the main subject.  That way you won't have to be careful painting around things.

I had a few minutes more to spend on this before work.  So I did step 3.  Remember what I said about doing the things that should be done first?  Well, I didn't listen to myself (see-now don't you feel better-I didn't listen to my own advice).  I started in with an orange underpainting for the leaves and said, "Uh oh".  I noticed I should have done the branches.  Off came the orange and I did the UP (underpainting) for the branches.  I noticed that they're kind of an orangey brown.  So I thought blue would be great as the UP.  Then I decided I wanted to be a little more creative on that and I did a cerulean turquoise (my fav color, you know).  I know I'll have to add some bits of branches later but this is a good beginning.