New Still Life: Spode Bowl With Fruit

It has been quite a week over here.  There is lots happening and I hope to have an exciting announcement for you soon.  In the meantime, I finished up a new painting, the first of 2017.

On the spur of the moment, I decided to set up this still life.  I had no fruit or flowers, but decided to get going anyway (big mistake).  I actually worked on it like this for a few sessions, but as I kept going, I just knew it was not going to work out.

My original plan was to put fruit in the bowl and a flower or stem in the bud vase, but I just wasn't feeling it.  I finally stuck a faux flower in the vase and decided to forget this plan and move on to something else.

I went looking in my stash of props and decided to replace the bud vase with a candy dish.  I have a few vintage candy dishes and have been using them a lot lately.

This is the revamped set up.  Much better, right?  As soon as I set this up, I knew it would work.

As you can see, I just replaced the bud vase with the candy dish and then blocked in the fruit shapes.

At this point it was really just a matter of layering on paint until everything began to look like I wanted it to.  And it's always a happy day when your white objects actually begin to resemble porcelain :)

As I was nearing the end, I thought all I had to do was put in the blue and white pattern and I would be done.  However, after I did that, I realized things were still not quite right.  After some time just sitting and looking at the painting, I realized that it needed a little boost, so I darkened up the darks and lightened up the lights.  That helped give the painting a needed dose of drama and while doing that I realized a mistake with the grapes.  It is a little hard to tell, but the grapes coming out of the candy dish are more forward than the grapes in the bowl.  I had to lighten the grapes in the candy dish so that the viewer could easily see that they were closer.

Spode Bowl With Fruit, 12x9, oil

And here is the finished painting.  I spent a long time yesterday fussing with little details that no one looking at the painting will ever know about, but I think that is what makes a good painting;  attention to detail that is not obvious to the viewer.  I felt like this painting took forever, but it was really only one week of work.  I'm already on to a new one, but I'm very happy with how this painting turned out.

Btw, I got the Spode bowl on Amazon for $21.00.  Not an affiliate link, just sharing a good deal!