Green and Blue shades

I actually have three rather big acrylic paint tubes with shades of green:

• A 150 ml tube of Hooker's Green (System 3, Daler & Rowney)
• A 100 ml tube of Sap Green (Pebeo)
• And a 59 ml tube of Phthalo Green (System 3)

All three of these tubes were bought a long time ago. 

I started the painting in order to practise some mixing with adding white or yellow, even a bit of black in order to darken the greens. I also added some greenish blue. 

I enjoyed the painting, but somehow I have the strong feeling that I really need to do a color chart, starting with my greens. I've got some not very expensive watercolor paper from the 1 Euro shop which will be a perfect surface for color charting. 

 

Using aluminium foil for a palette

 

I have been using all kinds of palettes for color mixing with acrylics:

• plastic lids of yoghurt containers
• coated paper platesa 

Both are doable, but have their disadvantages: The plastic lids of the yoghurt containers are too small to mix paints adequately with a palette knife. 

The Coated paper plates suck in paint although they are coated. In addition to that once the paper plate is covered with blobs of paint you have to get rid of them. 

So I went for a third way of mixing colors on a palette: I bought aluminium foil and covered one of my paper plates with it. I fixed it on the back with a tape. Then I mixed acrylic inks and acrylic craft paints on it. I noticed that acrylic inks took a bit longer to dry which is definitely an advantage. Craft paints can be mixed without any problems using a palette knife. Yes, you have to be a bit careful with the knife and not scrape too hard, but otherwise things went well. 

Change the style of an image in Gemini

This is a diaslide I took a long time ago during a vacation in the North of Italy. When I shot the photo I felt attracted by the Renaissance architecture. I kept the slide, had it digitalized and then it sat in the depths of my hard drive.

Knowing that you can have changed the style of an image in Gemini I uploaded the image to Gemini and asked it to transform the photo into a watercolor and ink image.

Here is the result. Gemini actually changed the style. I personally would prefer it to the original.