This painting was easier than I thought it would be, but also harder. The subject looked easy enough to paint, it's a photo I found on Pixels. The intense orange looked like it would be a challenge. Fortunately, a few days ago, my cousin Lori passed an estate sale find my way - a box full of old painting supplies from the 70's and 80's. There were 5 tubes of unopened, protected in hard clear plastic, "pre-tested" Grumbacher oil paints, one called "cadmium orange". It was perfect for this! I added a bit of lemon yellow and alizarin crimson here and there and voila - the intensity came through to my liking. There were many other tubes of usable oil paints in the box, but most of them I couldn't get the lids to budge, they seemed welded shut. Finally, against my penny-pinching-waste-not-want-not nature, I threw out the ones I couldn't get open, as well as the ones with leaky looking holes that were sticky and gross. There was also 2 bottles of Schmincke German fluids, one called Leinol - gereinigt und gebeicht, frei von siccativen (translates to linseed oil - cleaned and bleached, free of siccatives) and one called Mastixfirnis - aus extra hellem Chiox-Mastix, feuergefährlich (translates to mastic varnish - made of extra light chiox mastic, flammable). The bottles look ancient, and not much fluid is missing, so I don't think they were used much. And where would this deceased woman have bought them here in the US, given that they're packaged for a German customer. Did she travel, and bring back flammable liquids in her luggage??? I'm not sure if I should use them up or not. There was also some long sheets of treated canvas....not attached to anything, so if I'm to use them I'd have to stretch them on frames myself. That project might wait a while (like maybe if I ever retire I might get to that).
Back to the painting. The hard part. The VW logo. I played with that more than anything else on the painting. It needed a bit of precision, but not so much that it didn't match the rest of the painting. I got that down, but then noted that the orange inside of it was much paler than the orange around it. Adding more orange created smears. I got that cleaned up, but still it looked off. Once I added some shadowing under the lower edges it finally started to look like it was attached to the van and I quit there. My photograph of the painting looks more yellow than it is in real life. I've noticed that same phenomena in a few of my photos - that the color on my monitor appears different than what it really looks like in the flesh.
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