Tonight I worked on limes. I used a string that was a little less green this time, desaturating the Sap Green with Cadmium Orange in the lighter values and Burnt Sienna and Burnt Umber in the darker values.

I’ve really been struggling with the fruit in this particular painting and I think the problem is the smooth Ampersand panel. The paint will stick when I first apply it, but if I ever touch the wet paint, it moves around and shows the Burnt Sienna of the underpainting. I didn’t have this problem with the last Lemon Lime painting which was on canvas.

The lime on the left took about two hours. After a coffee break, I painted the one on the right in 15 minutes. It’s not that I got faster – I got wiser and decided to stop while I was ahead and wait for the painting to dry before continuing.

I think I will need to put another layer of paint on all four pieces of fruit before I declare the painting finished. I also need to figure out how to make the fruit really sit on the table. My best idea at this point is to darken the shadows under the fruit.

I spent the afternoon painting two more lemons. The close up below shows my experiments with using more expressive brush strokes to harmonize with the white impasto.

Here’s the view from ten thousand feet. I’m pretty happy with the lemons, but want to darken the cast shadows a bit more under the lemons to create lost edges. The lemon on the right is problematic because it has a fairly light shadow, so I will probably have to add more reflected light to the lemon in lieu of darkening its shadow.

I’m always amazed at the way a painting just appears over time on the canvas. First the canvas is blank, then it looks like a drawing or a monochromatic painting, and then bit by bit it starts looking like a full color painting.

Finished another! This one is for the Maple Valley Arts event.

My first step was to flat-shade the shadow on the lime, using a mixture of colors from the dark end of the yellow string and the warm green string. I used a bit of paint from the blue string to blend and lose the bottom edge of the lime in its shadow. Same for the lemon.

Then I painted the lit portion of the lime, and then went back and added reflected blue light to the form shadow of the lime and the reflection of the lime in the lemon’s form shadow.

Mixing up warm and cool strings of greens for my limes.

My plan is to experiment more with broken color, so I have attempted arranged the strings so that adjacent colors have the same value. The warm string uses Sap Green and Cadmium Yellow Light. The cool string is based on Viridian and Cadmium Yellow Light, with a bit of French Ultramarine added to the darkest step.

This black and white photo shows that I was able to match the values pretty well in most of the steps, although the three steps above the darkest level could use some work.

I painted a lemon this evening for my 8″ x 8″ piece for the Maple Valley Arts show. The painting itself went quickly and was much easier than painting front-lighted oranges which require very delicate gradations in the light.

I tried to match the value of the shadows in the lemon with the value of the adjacent blue shadow. They look pretty close now, so my next step will be to soften the edge between the two regions, while bringing some of the blue into the yellow. I will do this after painting the lime so that I can better judge how much “lime” light will bleed into the shadow on the lemon.

The bulk of my evening was spent mixing a string of nine yellows. The string is based primarily on a mixture of Cadmium Yellow Medium, desaturated and darkened with a blend of Quinacridone Magenta and French Ultramarine. The values above pure Cadmium Yellow Medium were lightened with a mixture of Titanium White and Cadmium Yellow Light, which is might lighter than Cadmium Yellow Medium. I did need to offset the cool greenishness of the Cadmium Yellow Light with just a smidgen of Quinacridone Magenta. The dark end of the scale is based mostly on a mixture of Burnt Umber and French Ultramarine.