Had some inspiration for this painting from a guest on our boat who was taking a colored pencil class in Seattle right now. One of their first projects was to draw lemons behind a translucent glass– so I stole the idea and really enjoyed the still-life result. After looking at some other digital painting artists online, I wanted to try to create a piece that mimicked an oil painting, using all the brush settings and mixer tools. I had fun trying to create brushstrokes I thought I would make if I was working on a canvas.
To make this painting a hell of a lot easier, I dropped the “Kerr” label from the jar and didn’t keep that jar design. I’m sure it would have been beautiful to keep it in, but a ton of computer time!!
Here’s the final jpg image:
Here is the original photo I took:
The process…
I started out with the pencil tool, sketching the still life, just like we did in our painted selfie. I layered it over a grey canvas, since the majority of the piece had that grey counter top. Then I started going in with color and filling in the lemons, that are the focal point of the piece.
Once I had filled in the lemons, I started pulling colors with the eye dropper off of the photo (which I have in photoshop, on the left side) and painting those colors onto the canvas with full opacity.
I continued to paint and layer colors onto the canvas to fill in some areas– you can see that the left side of my counter, I wasn’t using full opacity– it was about 60%, just to lay that reflection in.
Now— playing around with the Mixer Brush and Brush Settings to get a oil painted effect. You can see I actually painted my highlights in with the Brush tool and then went back over it with the mixer brush…
Later on, I started blending and painting on with the Mixer Brush, and alternating between the two. Here is an example at the end– You can see I had already mixed and painted most of the jar, but I wanted to re-lay in that light green highlighted color at the base of the jar, and then went through again with a larger mixer brush to make it look physically painted.
And here is my end result…
Critique:
I loved this painting for a while, until I started working on the highlights and lowlights at the top of the jar. I wanted to keep my level of detail the same throughout the piece, but I lost some of the actual shape of the jar in the process.
What I enjoy the most: The reflection of the left lemon in the countertop and the abstracted lemon behind the jar.
What I think needs work (or could do better next time): I over worked the top of the jar. It’s on a different scale abstractedness/realism that that left lemon that’s sticking out. It needed either more work with a finer brush, or less.