Still Life

Red Shoes

| cathmary1030

Once upon a time, I had a pair of red shoes like this. My 8×8 painting is based on a photo by Emily Pottiger on Unsplash. I kept my palette limited.

Background color — Ultramarine Blue, Cad-free Yellow Medium, Titanium White

Shoes — Anthraquinone Red, Naphthol Red, Phthalo Green Blue Shade, Titanium White

There’s a few things I need to tidy up… the stiletto heel needs to be straighter; the drawing was better. The shadow of the leftmost shoe should be straighter, as should the divider line (for lack of a better phrase).

Green Apples…Round 2

| cathmary1030

So, after making my apples too green (and dark) with mostly Winsor & Newton Sap Green (and some yellow, believe it or not, I tried a “convenience” color (Yellow Green from Amsterdam). That got me closer, but at that point, I was over-painting the original dark green apples. The third try, I got closer to the color I wanted, but I ceased paying attention to the darker shapes in the reference image (including the shadows).

The only thing I’m relatively satisfied with right now is the dark area around the apple stems. AND that I finally got reasonably close to the local color of the apples.

I need to paint this again from scratch, but frankly, I’m temporarily sick of apples! 🙂

Here are the value comparisons between the reference photo and the original painted green apples, and the reference compared to the final painting.

Originally, my lights were too dark, while some darks (the cast shadows) weren’t dark enough. Now my lights are okay but the darks aren’t dark enough. And the apple at the left is misshapen.

Green Apples.. Round One

| cathmary1030

This is another paint-along from PaintCoach’s Patreon page. I painted what I thought I saw, not what I actually saw. “Green” apples are green, right? Wrong. They’re mostly yellow. The image from Adobe Photoshop Essentials shows the darkest green as being mostly an olive color. (Actually, with photos the way they are, the darkest areas showed up as black, so I “color-picked” the edges of the shadow.)

Anyway, this image testing came AFTER my first attempt here — and the quinacridone magenta wash, and Payne’s gray outline to start did not help anything. Ugh.