Here is a painting I finished off this morning as part of my home work for Ella Clocksin’s Observation to Abstraction course:

I’d done drawings of the objects on top of a bedside cabinet, one while seated and another while standing. I then used the standing picture as the basis for sketching out this composition, which has been completed with a combination of watercolour and water-soluble crayons.

The particular challenge for me was that, rather than my familiar tubes of paint, I was using some borrowed half-size pans. Pans – the little blocks of paint – are preferred by some painters and I can see their utility for settings like painting out of doors but you have to work so hard to get even a halfway decent amount of pigment. Half-pans are also a challenge when you prefer to work with a large brush.

Perhaps what I should try, for extra credit (in this case, purely the practical value of extra experience) is doing another painting from the same sketch but using my own materials. Does familiarity or discomfort with the tools yield a more vivid result?