I’ve just finished another oil painting exercise for Evolve Artist. This is Block 3, #14, and was painted from life.
Evolve Artist Block 3, #14 – Geometric Shapes. Oil on canvas.
This is the first exercise with highlights and shadows that I’ve painted from life for this Block, so I decided to use simple objects but add a bit of complexity with the composition. I wish I’d moved the objects a bit further down, with less of the foreground and more background showing. This is one of the frustrating things about physical media – what would be an easy fix working digitally would mean pretty much restarting from scratch with a physical painting! I though about redrawing the boundaries of the frame, but that would have left pencil lines showing through the paint, as it’s difficult to completely erase pencil on canvas, and this yellow paint mixture isn’t opaque enough to cover it. Still, it’s just an exercise, so I’m not going to stress over it.
Other than the object placement, I’m quite happy with this painting. I wanted to keep the overall colour scheme simple, and explore some different variations of the same colour. I chose green, since my green paint tubes are still mostly full! I’ve a feeling I might need to buy some more Naples yellow paint to finish Block 4. Evolve does provide enough for the whole course, but I’ve wasted quite a bit through being bad at getting my colour mixes right first time, and bad at estimating how much I need for a given area. But I’d rather use too much paint than not enough, as it’s a pain to make a perfect match for a mix if I run out.
See all my Evolve artist paintings.
