I paint (badly) quickly.Yesterday, I finished all the exercises for the color class—one day ahead of schedule. It’s sort of embarrassing.

If I could slow down, maybe I’d be able to observe more finely and paint better. Usually by the end of the day, when I’m tired and make more focussed, my technique is a little more refined than in the morning, but I’m never going to be a pro with paints.

The painting I did is a double split complementary, If you recall the color wheel, red and green are complementary colors. The “split” part means that you take the colors on either side of the complement—so instead of green, you use blue-green and yellow-green. And for red, it’s red-orange and red-violet. Which does make for a vivid painting, but I’d never consciously worked with that color scheme before and wanted to try it out.

With that painting completed, I’m not sure what I’ll be doing today, but I’ll try to make it interesting. I could paint another still life, I suppose. I’m not a good realistic painter, so maybe I’ll paint an abstract of yesterday’s still life. That way I can focus on color without having to stress about making it look right. Because you can see how well I managed that yesterday. Pffft.