Orange Slice

Wednesday afternoon I made a little trip out to the country to try painting a still life. A local landscape painter, (Jason Saunders) has built a new studio near Leiper's Fork and invited some folks to come and paint. Last week he had several still lifes set up and this week he had a couple of models... his kids. That's one of them in the photo. He is giving me the evil eye cause he could tell I was about to make a move for his Sun Chips. The floor was getting slick from my drool as I watched him eating them.

More people came than were expected, (around 20) but I think we all fit in OK. I opted to paint from a still life. I'm not into painting figures at this point. This is a detail from one of the still life set ups. Others painted the entire set up which included a vase of flowers and other things. I just focused on one lonely orange slice. That's all I thought I could handle. And I was right. : )

It's amazing how you can get lost in looking at a simple object and seeing all the colors and then trying to find all those colors in your paint. A real challenge, but the time flies when you are painting. I never got a the background a color that I liked, but this was the state it was in when I called it quits and went home before the big thunderstorm hit.

I know what you are thinking... the color in my painting is nowhere close to the color in the still life photo. You are right. I shot the bad still life photo under incandescent lights and I shot my painting under natural daylight. As we know, the light falling on something makes all the difference. That's why I try to stand in dark, shadowy corners.