Even though the outdoors is becoming colorful up here at last, I'm still drawing and painting inside -- maybe because the time I tend to sit down to draw is after dinner, after the dishes have been done, when the sun has set. Last night I looked around for something to set up as a still life, and ended up with two pears (I moved one around to play two roles!), the leftovers of a bouquet, and some colorful Mexican Talavera ceramics.
It looked pretty mundane at this point. The question I have to ask, when deciding to add color, is what sort of colors will create a harmonious palette that also conveys a definite feeling, and also, what will be the relationship between the warm and cool colors if both are to be used? Here I decided to focus on the gold and yellows of the pears and the warm red of the flowers, using a golden tone for the table too as a background shape that unifies the picture. These warm colors were set off with blue in the shadows and the rectangular shape (it was actually a green placemat) behind the flowers. The greens also unify the picture, since they appear all over the page. I made the flowers much more orange than they actually were. This reddish-orange needed an echo in the bottom of the vase, and the bright colors of the salt shaker, or else it would have been orphaned at the top of the picture and created an imbalance, drawing the eye upward, when it needs to move around the shapes. And in terms of shapes, it is a picture about roundness and different kinds of curves. Obviously I had drawn the pear on the right incorrectly, and needed to fix that curve - but I knew that once the color went down, it wouldn't matter.
This detail is a little larger than life-size.
Here's a drawing from earlier in the week, when the bouquet of alstroemerias was at its most exuberant. Sometimes, as in this case, a drawing like this ends up leading to something else a few days later because the act of drawing makes me think about the different elements, which almost become "characters" in a play. Some end up getting written out, and others get a featured part. I don't pretend to understand it -- a lot of what happens is subliminal -- but that's part of the weird drama of still life painting and drawing.
And it doesn't need to stop there. A fast, loose, sketchy painting like this could become the basis for an oil or acrylic painting with flatter shapes, and a similar but more closely refined palette.
I love this step-by-step account of your process. So timely, too, since I am trying to learn about watercolor, having set out with two pears as my first still life attempt the other day. Thank you for sharing this. In these times, I find that training the eyes, in as many ways as possible, is so important for maintaining a clear vision!
Posted by: maria | May 29, 2018 at 04:25 PM
Thanks for sharing these peaks at your process!
Posted by: Pascale Parinda | June 01, 2018 at 09:04 PM