I ended yesterdays post with a critique of my Apples and Oranges still life. I didn’t think there was sufficient change from brightest bright to darkest dark, that is, not enough change in tonal values. I didn’t want to attempt to fix that for fear that I would muck it up and have nothing worth showing.

Today’s experiments

First up is my retouch of Apples and Oranges.

Apples and Oranges Retouched
5″x7″ 140# Hot Pressed Watercolor Block

I deepened the reds with washes and painted in the background. It seems a little better than the sketch from yesterday, but I’m sure I’ll get the hang of apples and oranges eventually. Below is yesterday’s sketch.

Apples and Oranges – First Attempt
5″x7″ 140# Hot Pressed Watercolor Block

Apples and an Orange

Today I used the same fruit, minus the tangerine that I ate. I rearranged the first apple (by turning it 180 degrees).

Two Apples and an Orange
5″x7″ 140# Cold Pressed Watercolor Block

I’m not exactly sure what to improve in this sketch, but again, it’s not exactly the way I hoped it would be. It could be that the range of tonal values is limited. I could fix that by darkening the background and perhaps some of the redder areas of the apple on the right hand side of the sketch.

Appealing Mangos

I just figured out how to get the best out of a mango. I use a knife and cut it longitudinally, around the widest part (like an avocado), then I get the mango spoon. This is a spoon, larger than a tablespoon, that some people use as a serving utensil. I introduce the spoon at one end of the mango and inch it along, following the contour of the pit. I repeat on the other side. After this procedure, I have two halves of a mango filled with the yellow fruit, and a pit. I use the same spoon to separate the fruit from the skin. I never figured this out until a few days ago. There’s nothing quite like a fresh mango.

Mixed Media Mango

I also figured out how to paint a mango, er… paint a representation of a mango on watercolor paper.

The wonderful thing about a ripening mango is the color change. One end is red, the other end is green. Between these two poles, there is orange and yellow. My idea was to paint the red part of the mango and, while still wet, paint the adjacent part yellow. When I merged the two pools of color, I found the resulting orange color mimicked the color change on the fruit. The same held for merging the green with the yellow. Where the three colors merged, a brownish color emerged, again, just like the fruit.

Apparently, the mixing of the watercolor colors has the same visual result as the mixing of the same colors on the skin of the mango. It would be very interesting to understand the process of ripening on the skin of the mango and why the colors are in the same order as those of the light spectrum.

Mixed Media Mango
7″x10″ 140# Rough Watercolor Block

The label is the mixed media part.