My studio i.e. garage, is an inferno in this summer heat.  but today there was some respite due to a little rain. Phew!  So I setup a simple still life of a brush and a paint tube, all RED.  The goal was to finish this in 1 hour and keep things very loose and painterly and NO details.  Maybe the heat is a good motivator to finish the art quickly.

This painting was done on a commercially made gessoed panel 5″x7″.  I painted the surface yellow to get rid of the white surface. ( I wish I had yellow ochre instead).

Photograph of the still life

I created two kinds of blacks by mixing burnt umber and French Ultramarine Blue. (I use Grumbacher MAX). One black leaned towards the burnt umber i.e. warm.  The other black leaned towards the French Ultramarine Blue i.e. cool.  I then mixed them with Titanium white to create two strings of greys (warm and cool).  The red I used is Quinacridine red.

I found it rather interesting to use the warm/cool blacks, greys, white and one other color (i.e the Q red).  I used the warm blacks and greys to darken my reds and used the cool blacks and greys pretty much as I felt, a little dash here and there and not to mention the background has been painted bluish-grey (over the yellow underpainting)