I got back to my two onions and combined them with a spice mug and a pitcher, placed this on a black table and used a yellow towel for the background. Then I made a drawing in the sketchbook to test the composition and look at the tonal values. I wasn’t overly happy with the arrangement but thought it would work for the task.

The paintings did not turn out very well. I found the instructions confusing in that they did not make clear what the focus of the task was – colour temperature, tonal values, or combining drawing media with watercolours. Correspondingly, making the two paintings felt like muddling around without knowing on what to concentrate. I used Scarlet Red for the warm colour ground, and Indigo blue for the cold colour ground.

The main difficulty I had was that painting on these grounds felt like “fighting against” the background colour, rather than working with it. The scarlet red went totally Kitsch when I applied white gouache for the highligts. In the remaining time, I tried to “cool down” the overall effect of the intense red background. I added white to the background to prepare the yellow overlayer, which became a psychedelic orange tone in stark contrast to the blue-violet of the pitcher. By contrast, the Indigo in the second painting caused all colours I subsequently applied to look very weird and unhealthy, and I remember that I tried to “warm it all up”. The colours of the spice mug are quite good though.

I’m not satisfied with my watercolour technique in these two paintings. It felt like a step back into fiddling with detail and not applying enough water, so there’s no flow in the colours. I used coloured pencil in the first one to intensify the blue of the pitcher. In the actual painting the pitcher has a stronger violet tone, not the blue of the photo.

In the second one, I used yellow oil pastel to intensify the background colour.

Overall, I did not particularly like the effect of these coloured grounds. It may be due to the particular colours I chose, maybe they were too dominant. The background colours in the previous exercise worked much better for me.

There is indeed a difference in colour temperature of both paintings, the first has a much warmer overall effect than the second. But I wasn’t able to use this effect to bring elements to the fore or send them to the back. Maybe this has to do with the still life subject because the viewer knows that all elements are approximately at the same distance, so the distance effect of colour temperature does not work. I don’t think the cool versus the warm background convey a different sense of distance here. The distance effect might work better with landscape subjects.

I’m not sure what I’m going to make of this experiment. I don’t particularly like the outcome and feel that I have still so many basic things to learn with watercolour that coloured grounds are not something I would want to include in any painting for now. I do see some potential in creating interesting effects from layering and using opaque light colours over dark tones, like the yellow-orange background in the first painting. But maybe I’ll change my mind. It’s been very often that I did not like something right after completing it, but a few weeks later I was better able to see what might be interesting or valuable in it.