Today I started my preparations  for the final assignment #1 of the Course. I decided to study a still life project. I picked up several  objects and made  a composition to paint. My composition included many fruits and vegetables which I  arranged in a  silver colour plate. I introduced a  gold colour vase into the composition and some flowers. I took pictures of it from different angles so I could  see and study tonal values. During preparation of the composition I followed the advices from various artists that you should really go with  a flow and dont limit yourself picking up the objects, because it would help you to end up with an interesting composition which wont be boring to paint, so it would be always interesting for you to come back to work on it and you also have to be open for ideas which come during the  preparation when you sort out and try, “throw  stuff”.

After I drafted some preliminary studies I understood the fact that  my composition was very ambitions – too many  complex objects and 2 very challenging colours – gold and silver, especially gold (!) – I decided to go with painting a fragment of it and concentrated on  making the fruits and vegetables look realistic, working on light and tonal values, details so they  wont  look flat. Below is my work in progress.

I used a canvas and oil paints by Le Franck Buoregeois, Sennelier, BLOCKX, AMT and thin brushes by Daler & Rowney. I also used a turpentine rectified. During the study I  watched tutorials  in Youtube and Instagram  about a composition for a still life, about background colours and “imprimatura”, about still life oil painting. The following channels and tutorials were particularly  useful:

1) “How to set up a still life” by DrawMixPaint.com;

2) Composing a composition or setting up a still life or model tools” by OilPaintingWorkshop ;

3) Composition setting up and Lighting and Still Life for Oil painting by Stefan Baumann;

4) Laynejohnsonstudio about imprimatura;

5) Josvanr  YouTube channel about oil painting; This is a contemporary artist who focuses on still life painting and I like his style a lot.

Preliminary studies.