Honeydew

"Honeydew"

8 x 8 inches, oil on canvas

$250

 My very first painted honeydew. The color mixing was a challenge - honeydew has such subtle value shifts, and a lovely mix of warm and cool light greens. A fantastic opportunity to indulge in my favorite color combination - purple and green!

Cozy Cantaloupe

 "Cozy Cantaloupe"

12 x 12 inches, oil on canvas

$300

Click to buy

There are some truly tricky and subtle oranges going on in cantaloupe. I suspected as much, but I'm not sure I've tried this subject before - at least not in color!

 

 As you can see, I threw pretty much everything-but-the-kitchen-sink at it, warm-color-wise: clockwise from bottom left - yellow ochre, hansa yellow, cadmium yellow, cadmium orange, titanium white, cadmium red light, cadmium red, alizarin crimson. That's a lot of tubes, for this limited palette girl! (The blues are cerulean, ultramarine, and ivory black, in case you're curious).

Color Has Value

"Cantaloupe Slices"

9 x 9 inches, oil on Arches oil paper

Sold

If there's one thing I say over and over again to my students, it's this: you can paint something any color you want, as long as you nail the value, it will work! 

The single most important element of realistic representational painting is value: how light or dark something is on the gray scale. And that's relative to everything else in the painting - so our goal as painters is to train our eyes to perceive that hierarchy of values. 

Sketching is great for this, but black and white oil studies are even better. You kill two birds with one stone, really - focusing on values, and also practicing your mixing and brushwork.