The Buttery, Christ's College

Today I'm back to painting after a few days off getting my feet under the table in a correspondence chess tournament.  And I'm back with another of those indoor landscapes.  This is The Buttery, the student bar in my Cambridge college.  It seems they have a TV up on the wall these days, which I'm not sure I approve of.  Something they are doing differently these days that I do approve of is that when it's not open as a bar, the Buttery doubles up as a coffee shop.  That sounds good.

It's a three layer notan painting with my amber colour scheme, so transparent yellow, Winsor red and French ultramarine.  Being made up of a yellow, a red and a blue, this also counts as being in a colour key – it's triadic right today.

One of the things I did differently today was to add multiple layers of masking fluid.  The first was used to reserve whites (with large areas being reserved by outlining and putting a cross in the middle).  After the yellow went down, I used masking fluid to reserve any yellow areas.  And then I reserved oranges after the red went down.  You can see from looking at the final painting how important it was to reserve the yellows and oranges with so many tiny shapes in those colours.  The other thing I kind of did differently was to try extra hard to keep the second (red) layer quite light so that the medium tones come out orange rather than in the red that I'd have got from applying the semi transparent Winsor red too thickly.

And it all came out OK, even if it's not personally one of my favourites.  Just like the room in New Court, it has a Charles Burns feel to it.  It's up for sale.