Sadie Valeri Atelier | Oil Painting, Art Classes, Instructional Videos

Today is a continuation of the painting I began yesterday. It's not yet for sale, I'll probably finish tomorrow and post it on eBay tomorrow evening. Read up from the bottom of yesterday's post to see the painting evolve:

Phase 6

Here you can see I've been brightening up the colors of the fruit in the bowl. The challenging part of this is making the light side of the fruit distinct from the dark side, without making a sharp corner nor a muddy mess where they meet.

I worked on the blue bowl so it looks more like transparent glass and not like an opaque ceramic bowl. I also made it more symmetrical and fixed the ellipse of the edge so it is more accurate and convincing.

A few problems to work on tomorrow: The fruit in the foreground is more detailed now and looks very different from the style of the rest of the painting. Also, the actual orange peel is starting to dry out and the shape is changing. I soaked in it water for a while today to plump it back up, I hope I can get away with doing that another day. I also need to deepen the shadow cast on the ground by the bowl, it's actually quite dark in real life.

Phase 5

I worked for a while adjusting the size and shape of the fruit in the foreground, adding detail to the background, and suggesting the wood grain of the cutting board surface. At this point I realized that the colors were getting muddy - every new brushstroke mixes with the paint underneath so you don't get clean fresh colors if you push the paint around too much. You can see it's especially a problem on the dark side of the fruit in the bowl.