Three studies in sepia

I recently took a series of workshops with Karen O 'Neil at the Art Students League of New York. She is a superb teacher and gave me some great insights in how to use colour.

Karen uses around 16 colours and a lot of Titanium white. She focuses most of her painting on colour value 7 and doesn't diverge too much from that. She's an amazing colourist. Her paintings have this luminous quality.

One of the things I also learned from my workshops with Karen is that I need to work on my representation of 'values' (light and dark) in my paintings.
So I set myself this task of painting 3 white objects -  keeping the colour restricted to sepia tones - I also chose a neutral background.

Looking at these, I definitely could still go darker with my shadows.

These are all small 6 x 6 inch paintings
(15 x 15cm)
Oil on gessobord panels.