Yesterday I skipped the apple lesson in my new watercolor instruction book (You Can Paint Vibrant Watercolors in Twelve Easy Lessons by Yuko Nagayama) because the ones around the house were not in the best shape. I bought about a half-dozen apples today.

Today’s watercolor experiment:

I selected three different kinds of apples for my study. One of them was Delicious, another was Fuji and I don’t remember the name of the third one.  Here is my reference photograph:

Ms. Nagayama encourages her students to feel the apple, all its lumps, and observe that it is not spherical, but rather has a pentagonal symmetry. I like the idea of engaging more than the sense of sight in preparing for a painting. Touching the apples does not contribute to reproducing a two-dimensional image with a paint brush, but it does increase awareness of their shapes. Awareness is a key factor in observation.

The above photograph is an accurate representation of the setup of my still life. Even though the parts of the apple in shadow are dark, one can see slight glints of light reflected from the other apples. Also, the shadows are not monolithic in color.

The author suggests a certain color palette for each stage of painting, after an initial sketch. In the first stage, she suggests viridian and yellow ochre to color a green apple, and to use as a base for a red apple. I found this combination to be too dark for the green apple I chose. I did use it for the shadow and the surface of the green apple in shadow.  I used a combination of lemon yellow and yellow deep, as suggested, for the yellowish parts of the red apples. For the redder parts, I used vermilion.

The Delicious apple, in the background, seemed a bit on the purplish side, so I added quinacridone purple to the top portion. For the greener parts of the red apples, I used phthalo yellow green which I also applied to the brighter parts of the green apple.

Finally, for the darker parts of the red apples, I used cobalt blue and yellow ochre as per Ms. Nagayama’s instructions.

This is the final result:

Comment:

I did not get the same range of color values as the photograph. The photograph is much darker than my painting. It is very hard to see any color at all on the surfaces in shadow.

My still life, as painted, does not reproduce what I saw. I see a similar challenge in matching colors to an object I intend to paint as I faced in drawing where I had to match the contours of the object to the lines that I drew. How does one exercise one’s watercolor paint-to-real-life-object matching muscles? Practice and play I guess.