Still Life: Pears and Vase

Last Thursday, during my still life painting class, I was having a lot of trouble getting the painting working. Overall, it was definitely not one of my better nights.

When working on the painting, the first issue was the general toning of the canvas. Since I had forgotten to bring my liquin, I decided to borrow some linseed oil and mix that with my water-soluble paints. Unfortunately, I used too much linseed oil and the surface was extremely slick.

After toning the board, the next step was to block out the items that I wanted to paint, using Terra Rosa. The drawing, in the beginning was extremely inaccurate. The vase was fine, but the pears were too small and the small yellow apples were too close to the pears.

The next step was to start laying in the base color. In this situation, I did not refer to my still life as much as I should. The most important part, which Karen Winslow, my instructor, mentioned was that I forgot to evaluate where my light was coming from. In this case, it was the left side of the pears. I had the left side way too dark. She took the brush, mixed some more appropriate colors and laid down the basic colors on the left side of the pears. She also pointed out the issues with the leaves and helped me fix them.

Overall, a rough night. However, I learned a lot. Another important thing that I learned was that I need to replace the white board on my paint palette (where my paint sits on) to be a mid-tone grey. This will help me see the relative values of my colors, better.