(Home) – Studio Painting – 5th Still-life Project – Bolder Brushstrokes

First, I’m thinking I still need to play with these shadows. They need to be longer. This shiny contrast between the items in the still life and the shadow is entirely what I see and is due to the pro-photo lighting I have about two feel from the model. It casts solid and crisp shadows… there are subtle ones as well and perhaps that is what my teachers meant when they once told me to work on making the shadows shimmer… I need to figure out how to fade them out a little more.

There are many more blue variations in the small ceramic cups, but I’m not sure I want to add them… We’ll see.

The teacher told me a few weeks ago to try to juxtapose the black & white more… I didn’t understand the way she worded that statement, and this week I was wondering why I felt so strongly that the black and white need to be added simultaneously… maybe because they combine to create the living contours and contrasts we see with our eyes.

The strange white thing in the lower left corner both bothers and attracts my eye. I’m wondering if I should start removing the items that bother me, or focus more attention on them. Maybe they bother my eye, because they don’t fit the composition. I’ve had both confirmation and argument against this feeling from my classmates during critiques. Just another opportunity to listen to my gut instincts.

More to come…