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: Vincent Van Gogh

Looking back at my still-life studies blog post, I did use some of the techniques I mentioned. I liked the idea of using a paintbrush instead of a palette knife because I felt like I was more in control of the paint. Also, blending was much easier using a paintbrush rather than a palette knife. However, I made the fruits look realistic instead of making them unusually colored. In a way though, I did use contrasting colors because I put a green apple and a red apple together in the same image.

Some important things I learned from doing this unit were to always manipulate the color from the paint bottle, how to make colors look darker without using black, and how to paint in the same direction as the patterns on the subject matter. First of all, if I had just used the colors from the paint bottles, the fruit would not end up looking “real” and 3-dimensional. It was a challenge to not use black in this painting, but I learned my way around that. You have to neutralize the color to make it look darker by adding its contrasting color. It was hard to get the color I wanted by doing this, especially with the orange, but eventually I got there. Finally, a very important thing I learned was to paint in the same direction as the pattern of the fruits. By doing this, I could make the fruits look like you could just pick them right out of the painting. This technique really helped with the red apple because that fruit in particular had a lot of detail. Overall, I learned many things from this unit.