Martha is mid-leap. For any of you out there who follow 'Wonder Weeks', you'll understand. For those who don't, a leap is a growth spurt. It essentially means that for the next 20 days, Martha will sleep and eat less, she'll be more clingy and she'll wake from every nap to see a world that is vastly different to the one she said goodnight to an hour or so before. And as a Mum, it's fascinating to watch her growing into a proper little girl. In the last week alone, she's started forming words and making moves to crawl.
And I feel like I'm also leaping ahead with my painting. I've only had a few hours each evening in the last couple of weeks to really sit down and focus on it, but somehow I have really progressed with colour and composition. I'm LOVING using bright florescent colours as my background border and I think it really pops the colours in the painting.
I started by using some beautiful handmade paper to do some colour tests and I'm really happy with the results so far. I had, however, very naively not taken into consideration quite how much the background colour has on pigments in the picture. My next experiments will be looking at how I keep my bright border, but not throw the colours in the rest of the painting. Every day is a school day in my (kitchen) studio.
But for now, I'm off to paint...
