Day 0006

A cowrie shell. Fun to paint, surprisingly hard to scan. It needed a ton of adjustment to even mildly resemble the painting. I think it’s because of the large number of warm and cool grays, and the fact that the image tilts so much to the lighter end. Cowries are a lot of fun to paint, with rich warm colors and cool highlights that really encourage a more planned way of painting—basic form, shading, then mottling and then finally highlights. I lost track on this one and just concentrated on edges, I was really interested in where, with the shifting tones of the shell, the shell value matched the value of the background board. I tried to represent that by losing the edge there. That’s something I always used to avoid, having a somewhat Medieval approach to painting, but now it’s one of my favorite things.