I've had such a difficult time with watercolors recently that I decided to try oil painting again. I took an oil painting class five years ago, but then got busy with other things and never did much with it. I'd like to try again.
These mandarins are my first attempt. The color is too intense and the range of values doesn't include darks, as the gray scale version below clearly illustrates. After reading Laura's suggestion on Jana's blog about darker values through the use of glazes, I decided this painting might benefit from that technique. But I'm not sure what colors to use for the glazes and would welcome suggestions. I choose not to use a blue/orange complimentary mix to contour the mandarins because I didn't like the greenish brown color which resulted, (see under leaf on right mandarin) and adding darker red colors looked too garish.
Any suggestions regarding how to improve this painting would be greatly appreciated.
5 comments:
Your blog is beautiful!!!! the way the color of the tangerines is rendered is very lyrical:) Lovely :) thank you for sharing this :)
Far be it from me to give anyone advice on values--especially dark ones! (I do some some small dark values here, though.)But I do like the simplicity of this picture; the brightness of the clementines doesn't bother me a bit (my painting teacher Bonnie suggested that if something didn't "bother" us, we shouldn't change it). I like the way the background is done, whispery and gray.
Hey thats a lovely piece of art..!!
As beautiful as the mandarines are, there is little change in value (as you already know by the b/w photo). Doing a few thumbnails to establish your light,med and dark values helps a lot. In oil you could even do a grisille painting and then add the glazes to bring out your color. You could experiment with glazing with a phalo green to darken some areas. Lay it on thin and if it looks too harsh or dark, wipe it back some. I would glaze onto the fruit and table to unify it. if you don't like the result, wipe it off!
Actually, I really love the intense colors in that painting. Very lyrical indeed.
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