Acrylic Project: From My Garden

Week 3

By this time you should have your background done and veggies based in. Some of you have created your own designs with different fruit or vegetables you will have to get your own reference as far as color and highlights just keep in mind that the light is coming from the front, upper right hand side as if there was a window opposite from the set up illuminating the veggies.

Once you have things based in you can start bringing shape and life to your veggies with more color and shading. This is not the final shading so please do not try to finish as you go, you want to try and keep all of your painting to the same degree of effort throughout the painting process so you don’t overwork one area and under work other areas, so move around your painting and you will like the results much better.

All of the veggies have a base color such as orange or yellow or green, this will be where you start with your color and to that you will add color to darken and slightly gray the colors for now, like I said, this is not the finished painting, we still have some work to do to establish our values.

To gray a color or to create a shadow or form shadow color, you will need to add a form of the colors compliment color. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the color wheel there are 3 primary colors: Blue, yellow and red and they are on the thirds of the wheel. If you mix equal parts midway between each of the primary colors you get secondary colors: Green, orange and purple. Green is between blue and yellow, orange is between red and yellow and purple is between blue and red, these secondary colors are directly across from a primary color: Red – Green, Blue – Orange, Yellow – Purple. This is the simple version, there are whole courses on color and color theory and volumes of books if you want to know more, but for our purposes this is what you need to remember. So when I say to create a shadow color or a grayed color, what I mean is to add its compliment or some form of its compliment.

Most of you don’t have any trouble mixing mud, it is very easy to do your color just needs to have all 3 primary colors present and they cancel each other out creating a muddy gray color, usually not the color we want. The way to create a softer grayer color is to start out with the color

you want – say green – to gray the color you will need to add red or something with red in it like sienna or purple, depending on what you need. The red or sienna, which is in the orange family, or orange these will gray the color but not change its value too much (values is the lightness or darkness of a color), purple will not only change the color but can change the value to a darker form of green. Conversely, if you are working with red, you will add some form of green to gray the color.

The key to color mixing, especially when you are learning, is to sneak up on the color you want. Some colors like sienna and purple or pthalo blue or pthalo green are very potent colors and little amounts go a very long way, for instance if you were trying to add purple to gray the yellow for the zucchini you would NOT want to mix them in equal amounts or you would get a grayed purple, even 10 yellow to 1 purple may be too much but it is a much better place to start than 1:1.

I’m not going to give a stroke by stroke description for each element in the painting, you will have to look at what your are painting and mix paint accordingly but do keep in mind that where

the shadows are. I was using a synthetic sable flat brush because it gives me more control, I started in the shadowed areas with a darker color and on some of the veggies they have grooves where they are darker in the recesses, then as I worked up to lighter areas, I added the lighter version of the color I was using and in some cases just a little gesso to lighten. I am nowhere near the highlights so this is just to create the form. My brush strokes followed the shape of the object and all of these things are rounded so watch your strokes.

The last thing I did was I darkened the background corners even more. This is a personal choice, I like dramatic light, however, if you don’t want it as dark, you do not have to make it as dark as mine. Finishing up a project is always up to you to fit your needs and your likes, I just show you how I finish a project like this to show you one option in an infinite world of options, you will make your own choices.

There is a possibility we/I could finish this project in our next class or possibly the following class, in either case we are getting close to the finish line so you may want to start looking around for something you want to work on for the rest of the semester and I have help you get started. See you all in class.