Number 91: Gone Bananas!!

Another long weekend and I'm planning on painting my way through every minute.

Stopped by the grocery store on my way home from work and picked up some likely candidates to practice on. I decided to open with the bananas...

 

I plopped, or should I say propped, my trio into my setup and got my Guerilla Box set up with a canvas board. You'll probably notice that the board is toned a little dark. I heard about toning canvas and tried using both regular gesso and coloring regular gesso with acrylic. Well, this is the last canvas board that I went a little overboard with the acrylic, hehe!

 

Introducing Burnt Sienna - in a major way!! Well, you won't see much of the undertone as this time I made an attempt to lay it on thick.

Anyway, I've also come across a nice little tool made by Easyl that I've been using for keeping to my original composition. That's the gadget tacked to the upper left of my painting board. I've been kinda cheating with my composition by using the corner of my background setup to focus on the star of the show. I did it with the onions too. And I'm going to keep using that 'cheat' until I get some sense of how to do it naturally!

So, I get everything blocked in and I keep going - paying attention to the lightest light and the darkest dark. I get the background all in and then the lights and the shadows. Then I start thinking edges. I try to add the 'blemishes' of the bananas with my brush. Not what I wanted. Not crisp and clear enough. I tried a bright bristle brush thinking that the sharp edge might be the trick. Nope! Step back and have an 'Um, duh!!' moment. Why not use a palette knife? Voila!!

 

See? No more burnt sienna!! And the palette knife did the trick! Actually, the palette knife strokes went very well with and complimented the brush strokes from the bright bristle brush. Everything comes together in the end!

 

Gone Bananas - 5x7 Oil on Canvas Board

WOW!! SOLD!!

And, as a bonus, something to eat while I set up my next project!