St Benno part 8

With my two recently pulled proofs stable enough to color, I taped them to a drawing board this morning, and in the afternoon I started the process of coloring one of them. Over the past few days I had been looking at frog images online. One tends to think of frogs as green, and very many of them are, but they can come in many other colors as well and I needed to come up with a color scheme that would work for the whole composition. I settled on a frog that was a warm color (the image caption referred to it as bronze), with shadings toward green in some spots and a light underside.

I started pulling some premixed browns and greens out of my watercolor box, when I noticed a packaged set of 3 colors, one of the triads that Daniel Smith sells at reduced price. These are sets of three colors that can work well together as pure side by side hues and in mixes. One of them included zoisite genuine (a dark neutral verging on green) and permanent orange. I guessed that these colors could mix some greenish browns and tested a few such mixes. The results were promising, so I put them on the frog in washes. After considering a few options I chose a darker neutral as a base color for the ground around the frog, mixing it from the same two colors, and put it in everywhere. This early state is shown above.

For the background vegetation I wanted something more like a real green, and selected a few tubes from the box. However, to try to keep some relationship, I mixed some of the zoisite or orange (or both) into each of those colors, and put them in place, including a little here and there on the ground plane. The same two colors were also part of the mixes for the little critters, and there's even a little of the zoisite mixed into the pale phthalo sky. The result of today's coloring is shown below.

The color palette is a bit more refined than many in the first generation of saint prints (mid 90's), but the same can be said for many of those done in the past several years. Not sure if I completely like it, but it's good enough to show in tomorrow night's critique. If anyone makes a strong case for some changes, I'll at least consider it.