Poppies for a Dull Day. Painting Recipe.

I struggle to paint these dull days. It's not as though I can't see what I'm painting because I've got daylight lamps, but somehow lack of sunlight drains your very life blood away.
Today was just the sort of day to paint some cheer-you-up, life-affirming poppies!

Mary Kemp. Poppies.

I've been dabbling with several small pieces recently, on 6" x 6" boards kindly cut by my husband, the ideal size to experiment on and work out composition and colours. Some of them I've quite liked and others I've scraped off and started again!

Paintings of poppies usually involve that great colour combo red and green, well loved by the colour theorists and advocates of the colour wheel.
I used alkyd oil paints, and these are the colours.

titanium white
lemon yellow,
cadmium yellow,
cadmium red,
cerulean blue,
cobalt blue.

I painted straight on a board previously prepared with cadmium red, letting bits of the red peep through to give vibrancy to the surface. The dark of the trees is cobalt blue mixed with the cadmium yellow. For other greens I've mixed both blues and yellows together in different combinations, sometimes adding white.

It's not finished yet, but tomorrow I shall be able to work on it as alkyd is generally dry the next day.