Textures, GIF Colour Palettes and LOVE

My adventures in the studio yesterday consisted of working on an existing painting and experimenting with surface textures for some future pieces. I also discovered something today that I like while saving these images to place on this blog.

Here is the current state of my latest lobster painting. The details aren't there yet so it looks a little flat, but I've here blocked in the shadows and darks. Once those have depth with more colours I'll start on the highlights.

This is a larger canvas that I've been playing with casually. It's in early stages, of course. I'm not totally sure where it is going at this point. I'm just having fun with experimentation in between other works.

I've been playing with surface texture a bit recently. Here I've wrapped a canvas with tape and then primed over it. I've also used oil-based painting mediums to achieve a barnacle-like texture which I think will work very well for lobster paintings. This may lead to a large, very close up painting of a lobster shell - I'm going to do some photography with my lobster shells and try some Photoshop compositions to see how this could work out.

These two screen shots are the GIF colour palettes from two of the images above. I am intrigued by the really interesting colours that the computer presents. It is neat to see how the images are broken down into flat colours. In some way I would like to use this breaking-down-of-colours to my artistic advantage :)