Oh, those embarrassing moments...Black and Blue all over.

Here is a painting (lower) I thought was "really quite good" when I completed it in 2006. I had been deadheading in my garden when I saw these amazing blues when I looked down on my patch of Black-eyed Susans. Amazingly enough, the photo I took captured that color. I had an open studio that fall, and this painting received the most positive comments of anything I had up (oh the shame of it all). I was so pleased with it that I took it in to show off when we were working on "equalization" in the Master Painting class I took starting in 2007. It is "equalization" which is the good news. Kevin was kind enough not to critique it. And I still think it has merit so I decided to rework it. And what a difference. The flowers now have depth because of the color correction and that there is more of a sense of light. I almost totally did away with the orangey color, though leaving it some areas. I used mostly cadmium lemon yellow instead of cadmium yellow medium, and mixed that with green and/or blue with some purple to get the shadow side of the petals. Added white to both the light side and the shadow side to get some of the aging washed out tips. In the "before" the flowers mostly appear to be the same "age" while now there is more transition between the life stages of the flowers. The leaves I toned down quite a bit, though still keeping them bluish. I used cobalt blue, viridian green, some mars violet in varying amounts with white. Originally I think I used thalo blue and thalo blue green.  I did a lot of drawing correction and may still do more of that.

Equalization is a visual approach and it is about all things being equalized, but having more value shifts to create the "equalized" shapes since it breaks down the object more.