The last wash on the foxglove study finally went down clean, on the fourth sheet
Four sheets of Fabriano. Three of them are in the bin, and I do not say that lightly, because paper is not cheap and I am not made of it.
The subject was a Digitalis purpurea I collected on a walk in late June, and the difficulty was entirely in the bells. Get the interior of a foxglove bell right and the whole drawing breathes. Get it wrong and you have a row of purple thimbles. My trouble was the shadow under the lower lip, which is not really purple at all. It is a cool, almost grey-violet, and every attempt I made with a straight purple mix went muddy and dead the moment it dried.
Third sheet I tried lifting it out with a damp brush, which is the sort of thing one knows better than to do and does anyway at eight in the evening.
Yesterday I mixed it instead. Permanent rose with a touch of French ultramarine and rather more cobalt than I would have guessed, laid in one pass and left alone. Left alone is the hard part. I sat with my hands under the table so I would stop fiddling with it.
It is dry now and the bells have depth. There is still one anther I am not happy with.
I mention this because I nearly abandoned the whole study on Tuesday, and the only thing that kept me at it was a note in my old tutor's hand in the margin of a workbook: the fourth attempt is usually the first honest one. I have found that true more often than I would like.
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Three sheets in the bin is the honest part. People forget that the good one only exists because the bad ones were made first.
The grey-violet under the lip, that is the whole game. Straight purple is a lie, it is what the flower looks like in a memory, not in the shade. The shadow is always a bit of something else, a little blue, a little dirt. I have the same argument with metal in my rooms, the rust is never the orange you think it is.
Anyway. Four sheets is nothing to be embarrassed about, and the fourth one breathing is the point.
"rust is never the orange you think it is" is going in my notebook, and I say that as someone who has painted a lot of wrong orange.
the memory version vs the shade version is the part people skip. they mix what they know the thing is instead of what it's doing in that one square inch of light.