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   

Lemons in a Decorated Bowl

Daily Painting Challenge - Day 19

One of the things that has been a 'challenge' about this challenge has been being able to photograph the paintings in the right light. Often by the time I have finished the painting, it is 3pm or later and the good light has gone or the light just is bad that day. Yellow is a particularly difficult colour when it come to getting the lighting right.

When this January challenge is over, I'm determined to keep painting every day, but not posting every day. I'm looking forward to
1. Being able to spend more time and give more thought to what I'm doing.
2. Tackling larger works
3. Waiting for a day with good light to photograph things for posting.



 On another note, after I have photographed the painting, to crop it, I usually just upload for simplicity, to google photos. As soon as I hit the 'crop' icon, all these filters appear.
Usually they look awful, but this black and white version caught my eye.

I quite like this painting in black and white.

















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

Lemon Love

Daily Painting Challenge - Day 18


The title for this one was easy, since the bowl has the word 'LOVE' painted on the bottom of it.

As promised yesterday - a lemon study.
Though I didn't make it all that easy on myself by choosing a bowl with lettering painted in it. Doh!


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

Tea for Martina

So I painted this one ages ago and I have been dying to post it, but it was a painting for a friend so I didn't feel I could post it until she had received it.
Martina is an Australian friend that I met since living in New York. Her daughter and my daughter met on the first day of school and became firm friends immediately! Martina and I got involved in our local town residents club social team and organised lots of activities together and our families became friends.
Unfortunately for us (not for them) the family recently decided to move back to Australia. We were all extremely sad to see them go, but since we are ex-pats ourselves, completely understood their reasoning.
Martina asked me to paint something for her and the objects are all from her kitchen. I fell in love with the adorable red enamel teapot and Martina loves to drink from a proper china teacup so this is my tribute to her.
She received the painting this morning all the way in Australia. It is now in their temporary rental house while they wait to move back into their permanent home.

The tablecloth was a challenge but wow I really enjoyed doing it. It wanted to make the pattern believable while keeping it fairly loose and not getting too hung up in the detail. Very happy with it and the painting overall.


(16 x 16 inches)
40 x 40cm approx
Oil on Gessobord