Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Painting a simple still life - II

Three Apples still life, progress • © 2011 Karen Lynn Ingalls

Remember them apples?

Here, you can see the progression of the process of this painting, from setting up the composition (missing photos of the thumbnails - but I did them); to drawing and adjusting the composition, to blocking in the big shapes of color, to refining those shapes and colors, and addressing values.

Three Apples still life, progress • © 2011 Karen Lynn Ingalls

Here, those dark values have been softened by layers of scumbled color. The edges of dark shadows have been lightened and softened (there were multiple sources of light, explaining why the shadows are spread in more than one direction).

I have left the vertical black charcoal line untouched - I like it. It anchors the apples nicely in their place (and divides the space by the Golden Ratio, or the Golden Mean - a blog post for another time - which is pleasing to the eye).

There is plenty yet to do - bringing in the highlights on the apples, painting their stems, adjusting the lower left edge, and further refining of the shadows among them. Depending on how much detail I want to get into, I could push this to a very detailed place, continuing to refine it further and further (something I'm not as likely to do, given my inclinations as a painter). This is how a painting evolves!

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