There probably hasn't been a more popular fruit for painters over the centuries than lemons. Like all simple spherical forms they are hard to render convincingly, so I was glad to find this amazing Van Gogh that illustrates so well the directional hatching that we looked at last Wednesday.
Painting yellow objects in itself poses the challenge of how to paint the shadow areas that could go towards, green, brown or purple even. The "colour constancy" examples we saw previously will help us to overcome our fixation in painting local colour (the colour we use to describe objects generally).
It will be really beneficial to spend some time observing the shadows formed by the fruit on the table at home since they really help to describe the form. In this photo (by Ivyleaf from the Reference Image Library and adapted by the "Wet Canvas" website) you can clearly see the different hues that we would generally lump together as yellow.
On another note, the courses are available to book on the website now. The follow on course is at the same time on a Wednesday after Christmas where we will be looking at portraiture and figure painting. I'll be re running the "Principles of oil painting" course on a Monday morning after Christmas for any newcomers to oils.
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