Prickly Pear Burgundy WIP 2

I have the masking applied for the eventual sticker clumps on all of these pads and fruit. Whew! While they look rather "measly" right now I think that once the clumps are modeled properly they will look better, the masking is all one color so that makes everything look so one-dimensional. The light green color you see on the pads will be the lightest of the lights in this painting.

I will next paint all the glazes of the burgundy-colored fruit. I want these to be the center of focus so want to establish those completely so I can judge better how dark to go with the cast shadows and modeling shadows of the pads.

I received a wonderful, totally different-than-cactus reference photo from artist buddy Carol Kennedy that just is calling me to paint it RIGHT NOW! So, in an effort to slow down on this cactus painting and allow complete drying between glazes, I will start that one and see how well my brain will shift gears from a Southwest cactus to painting a Bayou shack on the water...both at the same time! Sometimes I wonder about myself, but if we never challenge ourselves we will never realize our potential, huh? Makes sense to me....I can't claim this idea of working on more than one painting at one time as being an original one of mine, but during a demo by my cactus-painting-hero Vicki Reed she said she always has three or more paintings going at once in her studio because she applies so many glazes to each shape and having more than one to work on allows her to let them all dry properly between glazes. Her cactus colors are so vivid, yet pure, that I have to adopt her method of getting the gusto of the colors without the mud you get if you don't let them dry between glazes. So, we move forward.