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Out with the blackberries, in with the cherries. Now mostly done. I need to let it dry, as paint smearing has become a problem. It needs a couple of cherry stems, highlights in the cherries, and a bunch of little detail work. Overall, I’m pretty happy with it.

Palette for cherries: base tone is pyrol ruby with the chroma knocked down with ivory black and burnt umber. I then worked into it with mixtures of flake white, pyrol ruby, viridian, and cadmium red medium.

The ceramic on the bowl is mostly Robert Doak’s wonderful Fra Angelico blue.

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Another hour and a half on the still life this evening. If I posted a picture, it would look a lot like the last one, but the paint surface is a lot more satisfying. There were too many blotchy tonal transitions, too many places where a blob of paint needed to become a subtle gradation. So I oiled out very thinly with walnut oil and went back over the fabric and the base tones of the bowl, making lots of small adjustments. Much better.

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I love painting fabric. It has a fascinating organic quality that’s a continual challenge to capture. So I’ve now painted most of the blue fabric, including the cast shadow from the bowl. The bowl itself, and the berries, are still just roughly blocked in.

The blackberries I started with have become pretty gross. I had planned to replace them with fresh blackberries. I am currently considering replacing them with cherries, because the blue color scheme is seeming a little monotonous (the bowl is white ceramic with a blue fish pattern).

A painting like this is at least 85% white paint. I am currently using Studio Products lead white, which I have not used much previously. It has a ropey texture that takes some getting used to, but I am starting to really like. When I first opened the tube it was very oily. I drained off the extra oil and now it’s just about perfect.

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This evening, another couple of hours of painting. It feels good to be getting back to the work after so long, although I’m feeling rusty. Because I worked with very fast-drying paints yesterday, the surface was touch dry within 18 hours and ready to paint on. I worked on blocking in the structure of the background cloth.

I love painting cloth. It has an organic quality that is such a challenge to capture

No picture tonight. It’s got a case of the fuglies at the moment and it’s hard for me to look at it right now.

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After too long allowing a busy schedule to keep me away from painting, here’s a new work in progress. It’s 16 × 12” on a hardboard panel that I prepped last fall with Studio Products’ white lead primer and have allowed to cure since then.

Wanting to ease back into painting, I wanted a simple still life. I spent some time arranging objects, moving stuff around and drawing compositional sketches in ball point pen on 3 × 5” file cards. When I was satisfied with the design, I mixed a neutral dark with burnt umber and Williamsburg German earth (basically a natural Mars black). That I mixed with different amounts of lead white to make several values of neutral gray. I then blocked in the basic shapes with a 1” flat brush, using paint mixed with a little bit of turps and just a touch of linseed oil. Because of the smooth lead white ground, it was easy to wipe out mistakes with a rag. The goal was to achieve a basic value structure with objects placed correctly and the oval of the bowl laid in correctly. I smeared with a rag and my fingers to blur edges.

Next step was to block in the background, which is a blue cloth. No details, just a base tone mixed from equal parts Doak Alger blue and Doak Fra Angelico blue, then mixed with a lot of lead white and a touch of the neutral gray mixture to cut the chroma a bit. I mixed with a little turps. Once that was laid down (the cured lead white is a pleasure to work on), I further blurred edges.

I then went over the whole piece with a soft dry brush to knock down any ridges and get the paint as smooth as possible. I could work into the wet paint, but I have no particular alla prima fixation. So I am now letting it dry. Total time applying paint: about an hour so far.

I may call it “Three Blackberries.”

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This is a demonstration of a simple still life, “Green Pear, Red Pear.” It’s on a store bought, pre-stretched 7 × 5” acrylic primed canvas. The previous night I applied an imprimatura consisting of raw umber mixed with lead white, thinned slightly with spirits of turpentine. I scrubbed it in with a bristle brush, then wiped it off with a cloth. The canvas is temporarily attached to a piece of hardboard with tape on the back. That makes the small canvas easier to manage and helps me avoid pulling brush strokes at the edges.

I set up a simple still life on a small table, illuminated by a lamp. I wanted more reflected light than the room was providing, so I taped a piece of white paper to my easel, to the right of the two pears, to bounce some light back onto them. The nice thing about a still life is that it’s easy to work from life.

1. I block in the forms with raw umber, paying particular attention to placement and negative space. My plan is to avoid detail and keep all edges loose until the very end. I am working with two number one bristle flats.

2. My palette consists of lead white, burnt sienna, raw sienna, Studio Products Tuscan red, yellow ochre, Williamsburg Italian terre verte, cadmium green (a convenience mixture of pthalo blue and cadmium yellow), viridian, pyrol ruby, and ultramarine blue. I establish the foreground and background, trying to keep some color variability in the dull yellow browns.

3. I block in the basic color and gradations of the green pear, focusing on making it look round. To do that, I pay particular attention to the upper lights, the darker lights, the terminator, and the reflected lights. I avoid highlights and try to keep all edges soft. The goal is to determine the overall average value, hue, and chroma for each small section and put that down without getting into any details. The basic method is to lay in a few strokes of color with a bristle flat, then go back over with a dry synthetic sable round, which I clean often. I use the round to soften edges and to move the paint around so that it better reflects the wash of light across the rounded form of the pear. I notice that I’ve made the green pear a bit too vertical. That’s one of my common errors—I tend to make things more symmetrical, more orderly, and more regular than they really are. Fortunately, I caught it at an early stage, so it won’t be too hard to fix.

4. I complete the basic block in of all tones, trying to provide lots of specific information without getting tied into fiddly little details. I correct the symmetry problem with the green pear.

5. Now I switch to smaller synthetic flat brushes. I begin to go over each section of the painting, now getting much more specific. The goal is to capture the shape of the light on each small section of each of the two pears. In other words, to make it not just a couple of pears, but these particular pears, in this particular light, from this particular viewpoint.

6. Lots of details rendered: highlights, edges, small forms within large forms. I’m pretty happy with the green pear. The red pear proves to be more of a challenge, probably because of the more limited tonal range providing less room to generate a sense of form. I’m thinking about the background; whether to make it darker, so that the red pear is pulled back into it. Hmm…

7. I let it dry, then gone back in over both pears. It’s several days later, so they are now overripe and have changed colors somewhat. But the underlying forms make a great underpainting. I go back over both pears, focusing even more on three dimensional form and getting the right sense of depth.

Total time for the painting was one two and a half hour session and a later 45 minute session.

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And on day three.

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Here’s where it’s at a day later. Because I used flake white for the background yesterday, it is touch dry and can be painted upon without any tackiness (oil painting with flake white is a noticeably different experience than using any other white).

I’m now working up the foreground, developing the boot on the left. For the most part, I’m attempting to finish each section completely and move on to the next, rather than follow the more common oil painting strategy of painting in big shapes throughout and then refining in later stages (not that I won’t go back and fix something if needed). I can see now that a few of the lines and curves need to be slightly adjusted for perspective.

As I noted earlier, I’m not using black. The base color consists of a mixture of pyrol ruby and viridian, lightened with flake white and toned with varying amounts of ultramarine blue, burnt umber, and burnt sienna.

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I started this today while waiting for a couple of other pieces to dry (slow drying is the joy and the curse of oil painting). It’s similar to my earlier painting of blue jeans, in that it’s stuff hung on my wall in strong raking light. If I keep this up, I’ll have a series.

This is 12 × 16”, oil on 1/4” lead primed hardboard panel. I sketched in the basic forms with burnt umber mixed with ultramarine blue (thinned a bit with turps and a touch of linseed oil), then laid in a first layer for the background and main shadows with various combinations of flake white, burnt umber, raw sienna, and Doak’s wonderful Alger blue (a variation on cobalt blue). Next I’ll start to work up the general forms of the boots. My plan is to do this without black. (Not because I’m one of those “I never use black” kinds of artists, but because that much black would be deadening. Plus, it’ll be a fun challenge.)

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