#17: Farmer's Market

#17

10" X 10" canvas paper

Inspiration: Our weekly Farmer's Market has begun. Hooray for fresh produce (although there is nothing local, yet.) I stopped by a booth that has a variety of heirloom tomatoes. They were beautiful. While they were weighing my purchase, I asked if I could take a picture of some of the tomatoes as I wanted to produce a still life. Ta-daa!

What I like about the painting:

• The tomatoes have dimensionality and look shiny
• I had a lot of opportunity to practice shading with different colors

What I might do differently:

• It might be interesting to try this in an impressionistic style
• This would be a great painting for experimenting with glazes to make the variations of color
• I didn't pay a lot of attention to the stem and leaves, perhaps more time and effort could be spent on that area.

What I learned:

In most areas I blended the colors and I was pleased with the outcome. I failed to pay much attention to the blending on the two lines on the right side of the yellow tomato, and they aren't as pleasing.

The only yellow I had, up until this painting, was Yellow Cadmium Light. I first painted the lower right tomato with that, and it was too lemony. I bought a tube of Yellow Cadmium Medium and the color was much better.

In real life the background looks more black than it does in the picture of the painting. What I find fascinating is that I did add a bit of blue to the black, along with white to create some shading. The blue really comes through in the photo.

Photo from Farmer's Market