A collection of hands gathered at Washington Square Park one fine Saturday.

 

Details of the hands painting. I made it a point to avoid using any black in this painting, and instead layer on transparent pigments: quinacridone violet, alyzarin crimson, pthalo blue, and sap green.

The goal was a complex grey, so I was also careful not to use any true whites, and instead layered on alternating flake and titanium whites mixed with sap green and alyzarin crimson.

 

 

Because of the use of so many layers of color, the painting was easily tinted by any lighting situations.

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Painting stretched on a frame. In retrospect, this probably should have been a mural– painted on a wall and not an object.

Here’s some process:

First Quinacridone Violet and Pthalo Blue, I used images of flocks of birds in flight as a compositional reference

Then Sap green, cadmium yellow light blended on top of a glaze of alyzarin crimson. People wanted me to stop here, but the whole point of using these fluorescent colors was to paint complimentary colors over them to dull them into grey.

Then flake white blended on a glaze of alyzarin crimson and sap green. Muted titanium white overlay.