What To Do With The Blues

The sky was amazing late in the afternoon on Tuesday. I was driving to a northern suburb and the clouds had all sorts of different textures. Plus, the clouds were dramatically colored from a medium warm gray to bright white. The blue sky peeked out here and there. The different shades of blue were quite varied. I caught myself thinking about brush strokes for the clouds and what color to use to capture the different shades of blue.

Since I struggle a bit figuring out what color to paint the sky and water, I decided to play with my blues. Last night, I experimented with the two blues in my palette, phthalo blue green shade (GS) and phthalo blue red shade (RS), To get the lighter versions, I used titanium white. On the left is the GS. On the right is the RS. In the middle, I mixed the two. Since it seemed like the RS is "stronger", I tried to mix in a bit more of the GS. Who knows what the final proportions were in the mix.

If I remember the sky correctly, I think it was the color of the mixed shade along with something in between the mixed shade and the RS. This was a good experiment. On the palette, the RS just doesn't look like it should be for the sky, but the GS by itself, not surprisingly, is a little too green for the sky.