Garden Harvest painting - from ho-hum to fabulous!

Check out what Garden Harvest looks like now!

How did it get from this....

To this! 

Oil paint is great, because if you don't like what you see, you can change it.  This applies to your subject or what you have already painted.  For example, if  you're painting a portrait of a pimply teenager (or even an adult - why do we still get them?), you can choose to leave the acne out.  My first version of Garden Harvest was looking a little pimply to me.  There were two HUGE, pre-prom zits - the composition and the lighting.

The Composition

In my original version, the subject was much too high on the canvas.  The dispenser felt squashed and there was too much empty space at the bottom of the canvas.

Remember Step One of my pear demonstration - painting a simple shape and look at it?  Well, I painted it, but I obviously didn't look at it.  If I had, I could have changed my composition and avoided the problem before I got the painting started.

To fix the composition, I removed the dispenser's cap to give it a bit of breathing room.  I also added those adorable garlic cloves to the foreground.  I'm kind of glad that I made this mistake, because the garlic cloves are now my favorite part of the painting.

The Lighting

The lighting in my original version was boring.  Everything and nothing looked lit up.  In other words, it looked like all parts of the still life were lit the same.  The dispenser and tomatoes just didn't glow!

To show that the light was moving from the upper left, over the handle towards the basil, I darkened the background on the left side of the painting.  I also darkened the tomato and leaves on the left and created some beautiful lost edges (where you can't really tell where the tomato and basil leaf end).   The bottom half of the dispenser was distracting to me, so I put that in shadow and added more shading to the right two tomatoes and the basil leaf on the right.  I highlighted the clump of basil leaves to show that the light was directly hitting them.

I did add a little bit more color to the dispenser's design, but the white areas (like the handle) were untouched.  See how it sings now with better lighting!

Now if you could only change what you don't want to see in real life that easily!

Want dramatic light? Just think inside the box!

When I first started painting, I would photograph my subject near a window to get the dramatic lighting I liked.  I would then paint from the photograph.  Of course, at that time it would take months to finish a painting, so painting from life wasn't usually an option.  A few-month-old apple doesn't look so appealing!

Once I began painting from life, I struggled to obtain the correct lighting.  I tried painting in an unlit room with a light on my subject and another on my canvas.  The problem was that if I had enough light on my canvas to paint, there was too much light on my subject so that it lacked drama.

The solution was to use a box!  Now I could paint in a well lit room, but limit the light to my subject.  Hooray!

We just bought a new printer, which wasn't so exciting, but it did come in a nice box!  Because this box is deep, it keeps too much light from reaching your subject from the front.  I cut a section out of the side toward the top, which is where I placed my lamp.  I use an adjustable photography lamp, which is great, because I can direct the light from any angle.

I chose to paint some basil and tomatoes from our garden.  I thought the olive oil dispenser we purchased in Italy would add some height and I balanced the white of the dispenser with some garlic.  Unfortunately, I only had a half head of garlic, so I had to lean it against the tomato and improvise a bit.

It looks pretty good, now let's turn the light on...

Wow!  What a difference!  The tomatoes glow and the basil has become translucent.  Much better!

Hint:  If you are painting basil under hot lights, put it in water.  Next time I will try the little water tubes florists sometimes use for individual flowers.  My basil wilted fast, so I needed to improvise and change my composition a bit.  

After a half day, "Garden Harvest"  looks like this.  Hmmm....  Not my favorite.  I think it needs a few changes.  Check out how I improve this painting next time.  Too bad I can't count it as a completed painting yet - still only at 2!