An Easter Morning Painting

Happy Easter everyone! A week prior to Good Friday I had an idea for an Easter painting, and despite having a fairly limited time span to create it I managed to pull it off—and I'm quite pleased with how it came out.

“Easter Morning,” 40×30 cm.

If the hill looks particularly rocky and textured, that's because it is; I tried using some Coarse Pumice Gel with real crushed pumice in it for the hill, and it came out really nicely. (At least after painting it—originally I mixed it with some Titanium White to hold the crumbly pumice together better, and it was rather…stark.) The rolling stone was made out of Flexible Modeling Paste, another thing I hadn't tried before. I'm not entirely sure what it is exactly, other than that it's a sort of paste that apparently contains marble dust which dries hard and can be sculpted and sanded. Both were things that I've wanted to try for a while now, and they worked quite well I think.

I started out painting the sky by palette knife—which is even more relaxing than using a brush for me—but I'm not sure it fits entirely with the rest of the painting. I may go back and lightly touch it up it with a brush to unify it a bit.

I do think the perspective and lighting on this isn't that great—the tomb opening seems pretty high above the ground, the trees in the foreground garden must be bonzai trees, and the hill doesn't particularly seem to be illuminated from the sunrise other than a faint pink/yellow shading visible on the closest side. For all its faults it was still an interesting exercise, though, and it's definitely going up on a wall somewhere around the house. A hui hou!