Evolution of a saffron alley

I've been wanting to get more comfortable with saturated color and better at dark shadows and this one was a nice challenge. I started with a value drawing, to sort of force myself to see the patterns of the darkest darks. I used a fabulous new pencil on this: a Cretacolor Monolith 8B. It's a solid, woodless pencil of Austrian graphite with a lacquer finish on the ouside (instead of wood). Soft & buttery...

 

Next, I mixed up a new tube of Winsor Orange PO62 with some Gamboge Yellow and just went for it (some of the overwhelming chroma was later toned down with a light wash of ultramarine)

 

I don't have any shots of the in between stages, but here's the scene at the kitchen table:

  Hard to see, but on the left is a quick wet-on-wet study painting I did of a rock to try some techniques of mixing ultramarine, raw sienna and burnt sienna. It has splashed clean water and splashed paint for texture, some dry on wet layers for detail... all sorts of interesting things that I mostly then proceeded to ignore when it came time to paint the column of rock/stones in my main painting! Here 'tis:

la Spezio, Italy