Final Still-Life Painting

Purpose: • To communicate all of your knowledge about color and painting techniques to create a final, more complex, still-life painting (than your smaller still-life studies); •To use your knowledge about composition and placement to arrange your fruit and/or vegetable to create a strong composition.

Artist Studied: Georges Lemmen

With the still-life studies, the techniques I liked the most were the pallet knife and using contrasting colors. I like the way the pallet knife gives a certain style to the painting that you can't get with a paintbrush. I decided not to use the pallet knife though, because I thought it would be hard to get the colors, highlights, and values right for the fruits I was using. I did, however, use contrasting colors for my final. I thought the way the the greens and reds mixed together along with a blue background made the still life more interesting. Even though green, red, and blue aren't exactly complementary, they still looked good contrasting with each other on the final.

I learned that it is very important to really push your values. It gives the painting more depth. At the beginning, when I was just blocking out my colors and had very little detail, you can see what it would look like without a lot of value. You need shadows and highlights to give the painting a 3D look and show where that like is coming from, otherwise it looks just flat. The second would be to make sure your subject is grounded. Even if it has a reflection, the painting doesn’t look as good if the fruits and their reflections are “floating”. I struggled to make my fruits look like reflections and not just extensions of the fruit or a pile of fruit. Without showing that they are grounded though, it would look odd to have a floating pile of fruit. And finally, I think it is important to not pay too close attention to detail. If you keep painting over your subjects, they start to look overworked. I found it difficult trying to mix colors with the red to create highlights, so I ended up repainting my fruits quite a few times. All in all, I found that there are certain things you have to do when painting a still-life, such as color scheme or technique, and there are certain things you shouldn't, such as getting every single detail accurate.