Oil Painting Tips for Vegetable Painting

So I'm going back and with the bristle brush number eight with some straight red and paint some wedge strokes to reestablish the color right here and get this form to turn.

Instructional DVD clips. Suggest detail. Okay this one, we’re going to get in to showing some of the detail of the stems. I'm going to mix up some green since I don’t have raw green on my palette. Lemon yellow with a bit of the ultramarine blue, then a little bit more ultramarine blue and this comes down like that. There we go and there’s this large one. It's good to keep these details fluid too. I don’t want to stiffen them up.

Reflective Light. Now with a very soft brush we’re going to subtly suggest some of these reflective lights. There’s a little bit of -- I don’t know if you can see it in the camera but there is a cool blue gray here and there’s some flex of light back here, just the idea of the light breaking around and hitting in a few spots and those shadow areas adds a lot of drama. So we reach down, take some ultramarine -- actually some titanium white, mix with ultramarine blue. Very subtle, a little bit of here too, a little bit over here. It's better to under do than overdo them.

Highlights. So for the highlights, we’re going to load up the bristle brush with a big thick club of titanium weight. We just merge in the very, very edge of the little wedge stroke. Some areas we’ll use the side of our pinky like this, just press.

Well during this little demonstration segment, we’re going to paint this sweet peaches rusting on a very striking vibrant blue cloth and I placed a dark book behind the peaches to give us that striking contrast. And once again, I have the light, clip-on light to touch to my easel and would be able to observe the way the light daze and cuts across these peaches. And you’ll see, there’s a little bit of light peeking between this first two peaches which will add to the drama and really force us to set up that dramatic relationship of light and dark and hopefully capture the sense of light. So let’s some move on to phase one and see what else we can learn about these techniques that I’m presenting.

We’re going to start with a number five bristle brush and I'm going to use a small amount of raw umber, center out with some oil and use this to set up our major value relationships and to plot out our composition within a basic sketch, let’s see what we can do.

Stick the very end of the brush, very corner of the brush and bring that around. And you have that cool against the warm.

Highlights. So if you ending notes and a few little textural marks. These highlights are actually textural for highlights but they’re also details and I have got just a little bit there and there’s a few little --

Reflective Light. Now with my number three bristle brush. I'm going to come in here and just slightly suggest some of these reflective blue lights that are coming from the space over here to the left opposite to the lights source. We’ll do a little bit of that cool blue and then maybe suggest little bit in the paper itself. I’m going to dip down, take a little bit of the ultramarine blue and just tint it with some white, actually a tiny bit of violet got in there, a little bit of the crimson made of violet which is fine. I actually may work out better. Here, a little bit more blue through right about here, this is a little bit of light, little bit there and there’s a little bit right here.

Alright, using my number 10 bristle brush, I’m take a little bit off the umber and mix it in with the tinted blue violet I was just using. We’re going to use this to vary the background a little bit.