WINTER 2013 ACRYLIC CLASS

Project: Clay Pots and Chilies

I hope that you are all up to the point where you are done with the under painting because now we are going to start the highlighting process and everything needs to be under painted.

One of the biggest problems when we are doing a still life in class is being able to get proper lighting on the subject. There is a lot of ambient light in the room from several sources such as the overhead lights and the windows and all this “excess” light can confuse your actual light source which is the light I put on the subject. As an artist one of the things you need to practice is picturing in your mind where the light is coming from and how it is landing on your subjects, this skill can come in very handy when you don’t like a light source and want to change it, or there is more than one light source creating a flat lighting situation, if you do any plein air you will need to be able to remember the early morning or the late afternoon light you want or maybe it is over cast with no clear shadows… There are many situations where you can use the ability to “see” how the light hits an object and where shadows fall to make your painting more interesting and more dramatic.

My light is coming from the upper right.

I do this almost as a second nature because I love the drama one can get with the play of light and shadow, I know it can be confusing to my students who are watching me paint because they don’t see what I’m seeing in my mind’s eye, but because I do practice this skill all the time and I observe how light will fall under all conditions in the natural world, I can be fairly certain that the way I am painting the light is as close to seeing the real thing as I can get.

That said, I am assuming that I only have one light source (we only have one sun, so that is logical) and it is coming from the upper right hand side at about the 2 o’clock position, all other light I see on the real still life is not of consequence and I will ignore it. This means that as the light falls on my subject the brightest areas will be on the right side on the outside of the pots and chilies. I make that distinction because the light will hit on the left inside of the two vases/jugs, shadow will be on the left sides and fall towards the left.

More light on the chilies
and a reflected highlight
on the vase.

I mixed a beginning highlight color for the two vases with a base of burnt sienna, with touches of orange, yellow, white and even a bit of red on occasion. The taller of the two is a bit more on the orange side than the other which tends to be a bit redder so I adjusted my color accordingly. I was using a flat sable brush but you can use a flat bristle as well, I just have more control over the sable brush and I won’t be doing any scrubbing so the sable is perfect. Starting on the right hand side, following the contours of the vase (remember it is a rounded, curved surface), I pulled the color in and working across the vase and lightening the pressure on my brush as I got to my shadow areas to blend the highlight into the shadow. Your under painting in many areas will become the shadowed area so do not paint it out. THIS IS NOT MY FINAL HIGHLIGHT this is just the beginning of the highlighting process to create the shape and form of my pots. I was very aware of where the light was falling on the pots so I was sure to paint around the shadows.

The bowl was a bit different because it has some smoky color as well as the sienna color. To get that grey color I mixed my sienna with my blue and a touch of white just to lighten it slightly. Whine I was painting the inside of the bowl, I would pick up some straight burnt sienna and loosely blend the colors together so you could still see streaks of the sienna, looked almost exactly the same as the actual bowl when I was done. The outside was done the same way but I didn’t add any white to the sienna and blue mix so it stayed dark.

The rim of all the pots was a lighter version of the sienna and orange with a bit of the dark color to grey it a bit and white to lighten it. Still using a flat sable brush I put this color on the rims then with my finger, softened the edges because the edges are slightly rounded into the pots and the bowl.

Close-up of the ground. Note that the under painting shows through.

Going back to my #10 bristle brush, and mixing into that light rim color I was just using, I mix a bit more sienna into it and a bit of yellow and white (gesso) to get a soft peach color, using the long, flat strokes and the dry brush technique (very little paint or water on the brush) I dry brushed in another layer of light into the ground the pots are sitting on. Again, I am not trying to cover up everything I did before, just add a few more highlights to the ground, there will probably be at least one more round of highlights on the ground because acrylics always dry a bit darker and I want this to look like sun shine.

Lastly, I under painted the chilies in the bowl with alizarin and blue to make a very deep red color basing it in with my sable brush. I made sure that the edges were very random so it looked like chilies in there and not Jello.

Please try to get you painting up to this point when class resumes. We should have maybe one or two more sessions for the class project so you will want to be looking for your own project when you are finished with this one.