This painting started off well, but it didn’t really come together in the end. I loved the way the cast shadows faded from a deep dark blue, sharply contrasting against an impasto flecked pool of light to a soft blue haze that almost blended into the background.

My problems began when I painted the lemons and limes and they began to hover above the surface of the table. Technically speaking, the issue was that the form shadows on the fruit were much darker than their cast shadow counterparts on the tabletop. From an artistic perspective, I had failed to unify the form shadows with the cast shadows.

The fix was to darken the cast shadows and lighten the form shadows until the fruit appeared to rest on the table as you can see below.

I am going to declare this one done and move on.

My biggest learning from this painting is that I need to mass in unified regions of shadow, painting the shapes I see instead of the objects. In the process series below, the initial underpainting is solid because all of the shadows are unified. I got off on the wrong foot on the second step where I painted the dark blue cast shadows as entities distinct from the form shadows on the fruit. I should have painted them at the same time with the same value and, that early in the painting, even the same color.

As second learning is that Ampersand Gessobord is really different than canvas. It takes the first layer of paint very well, but then is gets extremely slippery until the first coat has dried. At this point any contact with the brush is as likely to remove paint as to add it. This isn’t a problem, but it is different, and I will need more practice if I want satisfactory results on Gessobord. For now I think I am going to focus on stretched canvas and canvas panels.

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.