Study of an egg under water

Underwater egg, oil on canvas panel, approx. 4x6 in.

8/15. I'm glad so many of you are getting a kick out of this little blog, and that some are feeling inspired along the way! Well, here I'm painting an egg again.... An assignment I'm working on involves some polar bears in their zoo tank seen through the glass, so at first this egg was to be a simple sketch of the light underwater - just for "fun," as I wouldn't really go through this kind of preparatory rigmarole (I could just take a photo, or Google some underwater polar bear pictures). Mainly it was just something different to paint.

I set the egg on an upside-down baby food jar in the container of water, with a worklight clamped to a shelf above, and to the shelf under that I clamped a stick, on the end of which was another clamp (green thing at top of photo), to which was clamped another blue plastic lid for the light to shine partway through. All that was fun.

Then later as I painted along I must have switched to using some Magical Ingres Brushes on the egg, as I got more and more carried away (I hate when I do that) and my sketch became a dumb, lifeless airbrushed sort of thing. I've never had much practice mixing blues so the color of the water might have been the hardest thing to pin down, and the camera didn't quite get it (I settled on a mix of Prussian blue, white, and yellow ocher - ocher goes with everything!) - that alone made this exercise worthwhile.