Miya HIMI Jelly Gouache Color Review #6: Deep Red and Ponceau

This is the sixth in a series of reviews of the individual colors from the Miya HIMI brand 24-color “jelly” gouache paint set. This review will concentrate on the Miya HIMI Deep Red and Ponceau jelly gouache paint colors and will also include updates on my Star Trek painting and how my swatch chart is coming along.

Miya HIMI Jelly Gouache color Deep Red

Last time, I painted Captain Kirk's yellow uniform jacket, and now it was time to do Captain Picard's tunic. Judging the colors by how they showed through the unopened containers, I thought the color called Ponceau was too light and orangey for Picard's uniform, so I opened Deep Red to see what I could see. As you'd imagine from the name, it's somewhat dark, but it's also a very cool red that I would liken to Alizarin Crimson.

To me, Picard's jacket is a very neutral red, neither extremely warm nor cool. Since lightening a cool red gives a rosy pink, I was definitely going to need Ponceau, as well. Cool colors are nice for shadows, though, so I used the Deep Red for the darker areas on Picard's uniform jacket.

As you can see from the white swatch chart, the granularity of this color is quite high, and the opacity ain't no great shakes.

Miya HIMI Jelly Gouache color Ponceau

Ponceau is a color name that I have never heard before, but this one would go in the Cadmium Red (warm red) slot in your color palette. It's very warm, but not quite as orange-y as I'd feared. It made a good foil to the Deep Red and kept Picard's tunic very balanced, overall.

As with the Deep Red, the granularity was high and opacity was pretty wimpy. That said, I didn't feel like I had to glob it on to get sufficient coverage for the painting. I might be singing a different tune if I weren't working on a medium-value brown background, though.

One more review to go to have this Renaissance/Classical Mythology/Star Trek extravaganza finished. Stay tuned!

For the original post describing the unboxing of the Miya HIMI jelly gouache paint set, go here: https://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2023/03/unboxing-himi-jelly-gouache-24-color-set.html

For the first review in the series, go here: https://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2023/06/himi-jelly-gouache-color-review-1-sky.html

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Renaissance Artists to Know: Andrea del Castagno

My favorite artistic period is the Renaissance, which covers a broad span of both time and geography and has given us many transcendent works of art, as well as well-known Masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Rafael, Hans Holbein, Jan van Eyck, and Titian. But there were many notable painters, sculptors, and architects who may not be household names to those outside the art world.

One of these is Andrea del Castagno, who was born some time around 1419-1421 and worked during the early Renaissance. Originally named Andrea di Bartolo di Bargila, he was born in Castagna, a small village near Florence, and in typical Italian fashion, ended up with a name that identified him as being from that area. Except for a brief period in Venice about 1442, where he painted frescoes in the San Tarasio Chapel of the church of San Zaccaria, del Castagno worked in Florence, producing work for the church and for private clients such as the Medici and other rich families. Particularly noteworthy are his fresco entitled The Last Supper, at the top of this page, and his series of frescoes on the Passion of the Christ dating from 1445-to 1450 that were painted for the convent of Ste. Apollonia.

Del Castagno employs architectural features to display his skill in the nascent science of perspective, as can be seen in The Last Supper, above, which has a similar composition to that of the well-known fresco of the same name and subject by Leonardo da Vinci. Del Castagno's broad, solid figures and the emotional quality expressed both in the body posture and in the faces of his subjects seems to show the influence of the Florentine painters Giotto and Masaccio, and his later work shows an increasing influence of the sculptural works by Donatello. 

Some of this later work includes Famous Men and Women, a series of nine pieces for the Villa Carducci at Legnaia (c 1450, Ste. Apollonia, portrait of Dante Alghieri from this series pictured) and the fresco entitled Niccolo da Tolentino (1456, Florence Cathedral), an equestrian portrait of the military leader. It is a painting of a “statue” that does not actually exist, other than in the fresco, but was inspired by an actual equestrian statue of Gattamelata by Donatello. Andrea del Castagno died August 19, 1457, of the plague.

Credits: top image, The Last Supper, from Wikimedia Commons

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Andrea_del_Castagno_001.jpg

portrait of Dante Alghieri from the Famous Men and Women series, from Wikimedia Commons

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DanteFresco.jpg

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Fun Facts about Rembrandt

In my previous post about Rembrandt http://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2015/01/get-to-know-rembrandt.html , I mentioned his significance as a master of the Dutch Renaissance. But in researching Rembrandt, I found out a couple of things that I didn't know before:

1. "The Nightwatch", one of Rembrandt's most famous paintings, was not originally named "The Nightwatch", nor was it even set at night! Between 1640 - 1642, Rembrandt painted "The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq", pictured above. But by the 18th century, the painting had become so caked with grime that people referred to it as "The Nightwatch" because, well, as you can see, it looks like soldiers on patrol in the dark of night. Imagine everyone's surprise after the painting was finally cleaned and revealed that it was set in broad daylight!

2. Rembrandt changed the spelling of his name, which was originally Rembrant. My spell check is displeased by this, but apparently it is true. Actually, many historical texts maintained the original spelling, even after he had been signing the new and improved version to his paintings for quite some time. The pronunciation was not changed, so it looks like Rembrant/Rembrandt was the original Barbara/Barbra Streisand. Just like buttah!

Image from Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rembrandt_-_The_Nightwatch_-_WGA19147.jpg

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