Reflections

During tonight's still life, I decided that I wanted to add some reflective objects to my paintings. So, to work on that, I set up several materials with different reflection ratings. The setup contains a standard copper bowl, a brushed nickel chain and a shiny pewter pouring pot.

This was extremely hard. After discussing the technique with one of my instructors (Jack Winslow), I realized that the texturing is solely defined by the number of highlights and the sharpness of the shadow/reflections on the objects.

Overall, I'm pretty happy about the painting. The bowl and pot were done passably well, but the chains were giving me some trouble. Jack showed me how to get the basic shape of the chains using three different color values with blues mixed in, but was not able to create them to my satisfaction (the ones in front were done by him).

However, the reason to paint is to keep improving.