Ways into abstract painting - day 4

In the morning, an exercise in following directions, as we focussed on a crowded still life.

"With your big brush and yellow paint, draw all the circles and elipsis."

Three minutes later: "With your medium brush and red paint, draw all the vertical lines" and then "With the small brush and blue paint, draw all the horizontal lines."

After which the table was turned round 90 degrees, and more instructions were given: the small brush and blue paint and the vertical lines, the big brush and red paint and the circles, etc, through a second rotation of the table ... and what did we come up with but - an abstract still life.

All of which were discussed - for instance, look at the difference between these two -

and then the rest of the morning was for painting over (or from) these, with a view to getting away from the primary colours, as it's more effective to have just a bit of primary in there among the secondaries, tertiaries, tones, tints, shades....

Stopping short of painting the entire thing grey

Grey becomes black, applied with a palette knife

Cropping was suggested and carried out, and
secondary colours are about to appear

All but finished; time for lunch

After lunch, a long discussion of the revamped work - here are some of the pieces -

Note the improvement when the background is changed!

which left some time to continue working on these pieces in light of the discussion, or to start our own project.

I'm planning to do "something" with the Sylvia Plath "Blackberrying" poem, with its colour-words - red-blue, black, green (twice), bluegreen, orange, white, pewter. My attempt to find "the right colours" via magazines

didn't find the greens that I hoped for, so that was my first task - mixing greens that will represent "high green meadows ... glowing, as if lit from within" and "hills ... too green and sweet to have tasted salt" -

Nope, try again... is it one of these? -

Or maybe it's a crayon colour -

It's not something you can find on a screen ... it's a colour of the imagination.