Tonight I worked on the limes. Gary had demonstrated his technique for rendering front-lit forms, which was to start with the darkest color and place it around the edges, and even completely across the form. This very flat, two-dimensional lime, then gets volume as successively lighter colors are blended into smaller concentric regions on top. Gary says to think of “sculpting” the object by building up the nearer portions with successive layers of lighter paint.
I started with the darkest color first. Darker pigments tend to be transparent, while the lighter pigments tend to be opaque. It is easy to lighten up a dark or even cover it with a light, but it is hard to go the other way.
After adding the darkest value.
Here I’ve added the second value, but I haven’t done any blending.
Now I have three values, but still no blending.
By this point, I’ve added all of the values and done quite a bit of blending to bring out the three-dimensional form. I found that I had to go quite a bit lighter than I had originally anticipated, and that the best way to apply the paint was dabbing with the brush almost perpendicular to the canvas.