Lemon Wedges on a Patterned Tablecloth

Daily Painting Challenge - Day 20

This painting was REALLY challenging.
I changed the lighting so that I had a strong light behind the bowl. I wanted to see how the light affected the lemon wedges, with some of them in shade, some of them in half shade and some of them in the light.
With this painting I really had to work all over the painting throughout.
When you get down to basics, representational painting is about isolating tiny areas of space and identifying and mixing the color that you see in that space.
The difficulty as we know is that our brains rarely just see an isolated space. The colour of the object we see in a space is also determined by what surrounds that space. (Think about the white gold / blue black dress as an extreme example.)
So to get the colors in the lemon wedges as I saw them here, I also had to paint the shade around the wedges at the same time.

The tablecloth is not the first tablecloth I've painted and I really enjoy doing them. I get much more impressionistic with tablecloths than with other things I paint, because if I tried to paint a realistic version, I'd be there for days. I varied the color very slightly and lightened the blue to towards the back to create the impression of distance. I really like it. The trick is to paint in all the shading first then paint the pattern on top. And actually it's a lot easier than it looks.

I was inspired to do the patterned table cloth after seeing this weeks Daily Paintworks challenge
The Patterned Challenge and thought I might as well continue the lemon theme from yesterday.

Also I left the lemons a bit looser because I really wanted to focus on the light in this scene.

Throughout the painting I took detailed notes about the colors I used for each part of the painting.


Torrit Grey
I have started using up my tubes of Torrit Grey.

Torrit grey is not a specific colour as such. It's made by Gamblin paints and they give away free tubes of it every year - and every year each batch they make is different. They make it out of all the leftover pigment collected when they clear out their air filtration system. It's a fantastic way of recycling.

I have a number of different tubes of it. I've been wondering what to use it for and discovered it's great for tinting yellow.

(8 x 8 inches)
20 x 20cm approx
Oil on Gessobord