Final Still-Life Painting

Purpose:

To communicate all of your knowledge about color and painting techniques to create a final, more complex, still-life painting than your smaller still-life studies.

To use your knowledge about composition and placement to arrange your fruit and/or vegetable to create a strong composition.

Artist Studied:

Paul Cézane

In Reference to My Studies:

I mentioned blending and a lack of dry brush or texture. I ended up using the blending technique for just about all of my final painting. I used dry brush in a couple areas for highlights, but i found blending was the best way to incorporate a gradual change in values that was needed for the shapes of the fruits I painted. I also mentioned how I needed to work on defining the darkest and lightest values on the studies. A problem I had with those is that I was not making enough contrast between light and dark and it caused the studies to look flat. I did my best to fix this in my Final Painting by adding a lot of contrary color to shadows and dark areas on the fruit and then gradually changing the value towards the light areas. Then, in another layer after that paint had dried, I mixed a lot of white with the color of the fruit that I had been using and used that to paint highlights. After that I had to touch it all up a little more to make a more gradual change in value so that the fruit appeared three dimensional.

Three Things I Learned:

I learned how to make objects in a painting three dimensional. I started out using a lot of outlining and harsh contrasts from light values to dark but I learned to blend colors gradually to give the subject an organic shape. You can see the difference between the studies and my final painting by looking at the curvy shapes on the top of the peppers. In the studies, they are just outlined with a dark value and then filled in with a medium value with some highlights. In my final painting, I blended values gradually but was able to still keep the shape of the curves.

I learned to paint in layers. The whole painting process is much easier and more organized now that I know the order that makes most sense to paint, starting with blocking out colors and building up more and more layers in the background and then painting the subject over that. For each of the fruits in my final painting, there are probably as many as six layers underneath them of blocking out solid colors, then outlines, then highlights, then gradual values I would nott have been able to paint in just one layer.

I also learned how to ground a still life painting. The most effective way I did this in my opinion was the way I changed the directions of brush strokes and color in the shadow when it went from being on the “ground” to the “wall.” Each surface of background is also a slightly different color so that it does not look like fruit are floating in space. The directions of their brushstrokes also changes from vertical to diagonal depending on which direction they are facing according to the “ground” of the painting.