STAGE SEVEN

I then moved my attention back to the petals, looking for the darkest darks of the petals, mixing the three primaries with a dot of white to create dark neutrals. The choice of whether they were dark purplegrey, blue-grey, green-grey and so on, was up to me but I was led by what the photograph suggested and the more I looked, the more colour I saw in the shadows. I continued looking for the mid tones, mixing the three primaries, ultramarine, alizarin scarlet and cadmium yellow and more white in quantities to shift from a blue-grey to a green-grey to a purple or pinky-grey, adjusting the light or darkness of the tone by adding more titanium white or raw umber. I painted brushstrokes of tone in an energetic way, unrestricted by the exact shape of the flower, concentrating instead on painting tone and colour in individual patches. Tone, not colour, is the focus here