Monday, November 28th was a transitional day of clouds and breeze. We are on our way to a cold front coming through on Tuesday with heavy rain and dropping temperatures.
I've gotten into a gray rut by mixing French ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson and cadmium yellow light together. To break out of this habit I mixed French ultramarine with cadmium red and cadmium yellow deep to create the gray in this painting. See any difference?
These soft low cumulus clouds were in the northwest on the 28th at 1:45 pm with peeks of blue sky between. With the wind they were moving steadily northeast at about 15 mph.
Some definitions of gray or grey indicate that it is a neutral color between black and white. Further that gray is achromatic meaning "possessing no hue" or color. Well I disagree. At least in watercolor, mixed grays have lots of hues. I usually mix a blue, a red and a yellow. I like the idea that colors shouldn't be overmixed so that they still have hints of the individual colors used to create them.
My 1970 reprint of the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary prefers the spelling grey. Under gray, it reads "see grey". Under grey, there are two pages of definitions. Both variants in spelling have validity, according to the OED:
With regard to the question of usage, an inquiry by Dr. Murray in Nov. 1893 elicited a large number of replies, from which it appeared that in Great Britain the form grey is the more frequent in use, notwithstanding the authority of Johnson and later Eng. lexicographers, who have all given the preference to gray.
This gray/grey painting was created on October 11th at about 10 pm facing east. The city glow at the bottom of the painting is from streetlights.
