After a bad day lets paint something easy I thought. Oranges seem easy, right?
Well, they didn’t turn out to be so easy to paint. Good outcome but I can’t wait to tackle them again, maybe tomorrow.
Overview
After a pretty crappy Sunday (thanks to work) I decided to paint a subject which I thought would be pretty easy. I was wrong… The drawing wasn’t very hard at all, it was the color and values that were difficult. I learned quickly that brighter and more intense color really makes it hard to see the values. I’m sure I will have a lot to say about that below.
I have to say though, orange on gray and white just POPS and makes for a very interesting painting. If it wasn’t for the default nature of the oranges these painting wouldn’t be as good.
My hierarchy of painting importance
- Drawing
- Value
- Edges
- Composition
- Color
Drawing
How can I improve the drawing
Meh… I should have spent more time, but didn’t feel like it. I had this “Close Enough” attitude towards the drawing today.
Value
How can I improve the values?
So this is really interesting, the intense color made it really hard for me to see these values. Or at least I thought it made it hard, but when I look at the color removed I honestly think I got them pretty close.
I can’t believe that I got the back board so wrong though. The far left of the backboard should be much darker. Looking at the painting I was thinking that I was way off on the cast shadow, this shadow was super warm, but its very close when compared.
I love the comparison of the shadow on the right orange, those values are almost perfect. But then I look at the top of the orange and it looks like that should have been much lighter. Kinda wish I had some Cadmium Yellow Lemon for the top of that orange.
Overall I’m pretty happy with the values, too bad the drawing makes them look bad. Like I’ve said many times before I need to focus longer on drawing.
Edges
Not much focus on edges again.
Composition
I kept the composition simple and didn’t focus on it at all. The only thing I wanted to do was keep the entire figure in the painting.
Color
Not much of a focus on color here. I just recognized which areas were warm and which were cool and tried to keep them somewhat true.