Well, the papaya is gone. After I painted its portrait yesterday, I scooped out the seeds, spooned out the orange insides and got two bowls. I ate all of mine, but Joy said it tasted like nail polish remover and put it aside. It didn’t taste like nail polish remover to me, but it reminded me of something unpapayaish. Papaya alcohol maybe? I didn’t have a second bowl.
Today I’m back to mango as the featured fruit, this time accompanied by my tangerine and guava friends. So far, I’m stuck on three fruits – a far cry from a bowl of fruit, but I don’t feel any like rushing into anything.
Today’s experiment
I’m still wrestling with tonal values. Today I included more of the background (a white paper towel) to make it more interesting. On occasion I’ve sketched rumpled towels, drapes, pillows and other objects that have folds and wrinkles. They looked pretty good. However, I don’t recall having painted any with watercolor. I’m sure this requires a different skill set than sketching because I find it very difficult.
Mango Orange Guava
9″x12″ 140# Hot Pressed Watercolor Block
Shading
One feature of watercolor with which I am still not totally comfortable is shading and shadows. There are three ways of getting different tones: 1) add water to the pigment to make the mixture less dense and thus lighter in tone; 2) add white to the pigment to make a lighter tone; 3) add black to the mixture to make the tone darker. I suppose that a fourth way would be to add the complimentary color to reduce saturation, but since pigments are so different, it would take a lot of experimentation to come up with the appropriate compliment.
When I was in my procrastination phase of watercolor painting (i.e., acquiring many different paints, brushes, palettes, etc), I practiced changing the tone of the color under test by adding measured amounts of black, or white. The idea was to see the gradual (or in some cases, not-so-gradual) change from pure pigment color to black, if I added black pigment, or white, if I added white pigment.
Now that I am actually painting, I don’t refer to the charts I made. I take my pure color on my brush and dab it into a black glob on my palette and paint a little bit onto some scrap watercolor paper. If it looks anything like the tone of the shadow I am about to paint, I use it. Otherwise, I make adjustments.
There is probably a better way to go about shading, but I haven’t figured it out yet. I will keep this in mind as I move along. Perhaps a post on shadows is in order.
I’d love a post on shadows Jack. I like today’s piece. I especially like those yellow notes on the guava. I think that blush end of the mango is very convincing too – good enough to eat I’d say. Your points about the background are interesting. I like seeing more of it. I don’t care for papaya. I ate my first one ever in Mexico and was disappointed. You can get there in England fairly easily now but I never bother. Fitter for painting than eating I’d say…
I agree, Liz, papayas are strange eating. I like the way mangos change color in the same way that the light spectrum changes. The mango stops at green, though. I would be interested in seeing one that goes through blue, indigo and violet… A post about backgrounds should be coming in short order. Thanks for commenting, Liz.
J