Still Life: Lemon

For last night's painting class, we worked more on rounded objects. This time, however, we didn't have a time limit. The purpose was to try to remember all of the different methods for creating a rounded object and to study the reflection of other materials on our objects. For this lemon, I had to make sure that I worked on the reflection of the background on the top of the lemon, the table onto the bottom of the lemon and the reflection of the lemon into the cast shadow.

The basic layout of the lemon was pretty quick (about 15 minutes). As I stepped back, I realized that the lemon was pretty flat (I was just defining the light/dark masses), so, it was time to work on the edges.

As before, I remembered the important points for the edges:

1) The darkest part of the shadow is NOT the edge, but just inside of it. The absolute edge of the shadow contains the reflected light and some greyness to turn the edge over.

2) The cast shadow looks flat if you don't add the reflected light of the lemon. This was a problem that I couldn't figure out how to fix, until Karen mentioned this to me.

3) The darkest part of the shadow is where the lemon actually touches the table. However, it can't be too dark or your eyes would immediately move to that line.

4) Use various greys to turn the edges over to get a rounded feel.

After paying attention to these points, the lemon had a more rounded look.