Red Pear Redux

In a first attempt to paint red pears for my video (see video here),   I painted these pears.  I wasn't really happy with them so i started over and did what you see in the video.  I thought, however that I should at least post these that I did in preparation.

I like certain things about this painting, but there are a few I wish I did differently.  I should have put both stems from the pears in the rear pointing up.  I wanted to cross the one from the back with the one in the front, but in hindsight, I think it causes a little confusion for your eye.  Additionally, I think I should have put the red of the background color in the foreground and moved the green tinting to the back.  Doing this would have made the picture look a lot deeper.

Well, live and learn.  I was trying to do this all in 15 minutes and guess I was feeling a bit rushed.  Its still not a bad painting.  I like it.  Hope you do to...

Pears on Table

Ok, so I put my shadowing the pears.  I think it came out pretty good.  As I was learning to put shadows on, I kept hearing how shadows are blue.  I would see people put pure blue on their paintings as shadow.  While from time to time it seemed to look ok, I never thought that was a good thing to do.  I did, however, follow suit with that.  As a result, I believe I have ruined some paintings that I thought were pretty good.

To me the shadow is not a color (like blue) on top of another color.  What it is is the lack of some light on an object.  Since there is less light, the color of the object should be darker.  The shadow should be the same, or nearly the same color as the object it is on.  In this painting the shadow on the pear in the back is green, and a little brown.  Those are exactly the same shades that are in the pear itself.  On the table the shadow color changes to a darker grey, similar to that of the table.  Notice that I am not saying the same.  Since I have really mixed the colors in the grey of the table, and the greens and browns of the pears, it is impossible to make the same color.

Maybe I have begun to crack the whole shadow thing, and maybe I don't have to be as afraid of painting them anymore.  Anyway, I hope you all enjoy the pears.

A Nice Pair

Ooops, did I spell that wrong.    Well, it will probably pull in a ton of visitors to Dabfly Arts.  So I have a challenge this month of painting fruit in a group of three.  So far, I drew three that I liked, and painted them the way I liked, and am generally happy with them.  The problem is that now I am going to have to do the thing that I hate the most.  I hate it because it seems I take a relatively good painting and make it a horrifically terrible painting by doing this.

Can you guess what it is?  I need to add shadows.  you can definitely see that one pear is behind the other two, but there are no shadows on any of the pears and none on the table.  What to do.  I really like the green and yellow and brown that I have going in this picture and really don't wanna ruin it, but in order to make the picture complete, I'm gonna have to.

The question I have (for myself) is how long do I stare at this picture before I go ahead and attempt the shadowing.  I will probably get to tomorrow and have the finished product ready for you for the weekend.    Be sure to check back soon to see how it turned out.