Santorini Color gordonmeggison.blogspot.com

Our last acrylic class at Reddi Arts was designed to be bold , move quickly and be juicy.  We want to employ and leverage our neutrals so they make the bits of scattered color look bright and exciting.  The white can have varieties of color , the neutrals can run the range from taupes, to golds, to blue greys.
The photo resource is something I pulled off the internet,  so we'll just call this exercise, "Santorini Color".  It is ideal to work from your own photos or experience, but I am teaching paint technique, so this suits my purpose.

Step 1:  Here we go starting with the tonal sketch (mapped out first in pencil) using thin watercolor washes, then deeper shadows added with burnt sienna and burnt umber.  Burnt sienna is my go to color wash for starting any painting.  It has a quality of "light" showing from underneath the painting, as if you are painting on gold leaf.  This will become evident later.

Step 2: I set up my acrylic palette, and start mixing with the emphasis on the neutrals warm to cool.  Here I am not using glaze liquid.

Step 3: I started placing these neutrals in their appropriate light to dark

relationships, remembering the "Bounced light does magical things" principle!!

To make my cool grey neutrals, I used raw umber, raw sienna, and copious amounts of white.  I used raw sienna and white with very small amounts to make a warm version of that to use in tile and shady grout areas.  For lighter brighter areas I used raw sienna and white.

 Step 4: I started working in some cool neutrals using cerulean blue and white and another mix with some raw sienna mixed into the blue mix for the dark tile stones
 

Step 5:  Keep adding varieties of neutrals one on top of the other fleshing out the highlights.  On the white wall you can see I used a variety of warm whites and cool whites for grout highlights.

Step 6: Time to start adding the greens that go under the flowers I mix a little sap green raw sienna, and burnt umber to get glazes that let burnt sienna under painting show through.

Step 7:  After laying in a variety of green leafy strokes, leaving some of the burnt sienna showing through.  Next I started working the flowers in with white, raw sienna, and a tint of  red, to create a warm white onto which I will put a warm raw sienna red and a bright red. To create the flowers I use a semi-circular strokes, placing the flowers in light  vs dark groupings.

Voila!