40 Shades of Grey

Avon Valley Artists subject a few weeks ago was '40 Shades of Grey'
Interesting because the subject matter was totally free choice, but it had to be produced in grey tones, without mixing black and white and without using any pigment with grey in the title.


The idea of the exercise was to explore our paint palettes to find ways of creating beautiful subtle greys without the above mentioned colours.


My approach was to spend a couple of happy hours, mixing various colours together to see what I could achieve, I tried to keep the experiments to two colours only so that I did not produce grey mud!!


It was fun and really interesting and we all felt that we become entrenched in habits which do not always give us the best results. Our palettes are capable of producing really exciting outcomes.

I thought there were some lovely results from these swatches and was quite excited to have a go at the painting. So primarily grey with small amounts of colour to make the finished result read well.

                  Painted on Hahnemuhle 200lbs Anniversary Edition paper, 30 x 40 cm