Today’s watercolor experiment:

Yes, we had no bananas in the house, so I went out to get a bunch. It was a big bunch, so I thought I would subdivide. This is the grouping I got:

The two in the foreground sit well enough; that one in the back is the wild one.

Bananas is one of the lessons in my watercolor book: You Can Paint Vibrant Watercolors in Twelve Easy Lessons by Yuko Nagayama.

Here is my rendition:

Although my sketch could have been better, I like the overall shape of the subject. The wild banana shape becomes a little confused at its proximal end (near the stem). I attribute this problem to the scale. The sketch was bigger than life size and I’m not used to drawing that big. (It probably requires the exercise of different sketching muscles – more practice will probably help.)

Lemon yellow, deep yellow and burnt umber worked very well for the ripe parts of the banana; permanent green number 1 (Holbein) was perfect for the unripened part. I just bought a tube of mineral violet from Holbein (one of the pigments that Ms. Nagayama recommends). I like how it colors the shadows. Perhaps it works well in this case because it is the complement of yellow.

Looking forward to painting more bananas (pictures of them).