Elephant Sunset, Fruit Bowl, Peppers

Finally did a few paintings at the new place. Pretty similar to some of the stuff in Guelph. Along with these, I also tried to do a painting of carrots, onions and potatoes. In the end, I felt like its' shortcomings were too many to display. Too bad, since I feel like I've done well with carrots and onions before, but they've always been with things that didn't work. This time, I was worried that the potatoes would look like poop, in a literal way. I managed to make them communicate as potatoes, but somehow I screwed up the carrot and onions, which were the things I had confidence in.

Here's my Elephant With Radiating Sunset. I tried the sunset against silhouette trick for the first time during a painting activity that a guest presenter did for us while I was working at the Summer Program. The elephant with baobab tree is a classic look, but it's usually done with mostly black, red, and yellow. For this, I used contrasting colours flowing into and overlapping each other. If I had any regrets, I'd say the elephant is too big. Since the elephant is known to be large, it's supposed to be dwarfed by the baobab tree, giving the viewer a feeling of smallness. The elephant looks like it could eat that tree like a broccoli.

Did a similar fruit bowl in a previous post. In this one, we've got a pear instead of a mango. I liked the mango in the last one, but I guess this is a more classic quartet of fruit. The blue bowl is supposed to contrast the orange tablecloth and also the orange fruit. I really like painting bananas. Their grooves make for nice, clean shadows.

Here we've got four bell peppers. I've already done a painting like this, but it's in Guelph so I thought I'd do another one since I enjoyed the first one so much. If I had to choose a favourite food to paint, it would be bell peppers. Similar to the bananas, they have grooves that are nice and clean, and easily give a sense of direction and dimensionality. For this one, I thought the stem on the red bell pepper didn't have as much dimensionality as I would have liked, and I thought the colour of the green pepper was off through-and-through. It's too dark. I kept comparing the paint on my knife to the pepper, and it kept looking almost turquoise, so I kept darkening it until I knew it was to an absurd extent, and despite how it looked against the pepper, on the canvas it was too dark. The other shadows on it are also too dark, almost black, and it doesn't really make sense that its' stem should be darker than the stems on the other peppers. I still think it overall kind of works, because the viewer knows what it is in the context of the other peppers, but really, the green pepper brings everything down a bit. I think in my last painting, the green pepper looked the worst too. Don't know why that specific shade of pepper is so challenging for me.