Learning from your work
Every piece of art you create teaches you something. I find that the ones that didn’t quite work out teach me the most of all.
Recently, I decided to paint a still life of potatoes. I was itching to keep exploring still life after my Bowl of Apples painting. I followed a similar strategy, choosing a medium-sized canvas and painting an underpainting the night before.
One thing I discovered while painting this was that brights (a type of paintbrush) are actually pretty great! I never understood how to use them before, and felt like I had little use for them in my goal to create smooth, realistic paintings with blended brushstrokes. I have pretty much exclusively used filberts for a long time. I found that the bright picked up and spread paint more easily, covering a large area in a shorter amount of time (maybe part of this was due to the quality of the brush). Using the bright also helped with my goal of leaving looser, more painterly brushstrokes on the canvas. I very much like the way the wicker bowl and potatoes turned out.
Now, on to the challenges with this painting. I like cropping my subjects, because I feel like it gives a more interesting and dynamic composition. My problem here was forcing the bottom of the bowl (on the left) into a crop by stretching it out somewhat, instead of adjusting the entire drawing.
But the biggest challenge I gave myself was not planning out a background in advance. I realized at some point that the potatoes and bowl were very similar in color, and thought it would be nice to give some contrast with a cooler toned background. I had also just been looking at a still life book with some artwork that had bold, monochromatic backgrounds. So I decided to use Ultramarine Blue. Now, in real life, my arrangement was sitting inside a brown cardboard box. After making up the shadow colors and painting the background, I realized the whole thing looked like it was floating in a blue void! I had to add the appearance of a vertical wall or backdrop to ground it.
Huge lesson learned for me - I need to plan ahead on the whole image, not just the subjects. I bought some colored construction paper to place under future smaller arrangements to help out with this. I’ve already done a few small paintings this way, and it really helped.
At first, I was really on the fence with this painting. Given some time, I’ve revisited it and like it more than I originally did.
Wicker Basket with Potatoes
Here is a closeup of the wicker bowl, which I enjoyed painting:
A close-up showing details of the wicker bowl.
