It's week two of my oil painting course. As demonstrated, I have a long way to go before I create anything worth framing, anything worth forcing upon my parents, even. After the age of 10, mothers and fathers have no obligation, nor any reason, to cling to such artifacts post them on the fridge, or even to put them into storage into retired bedrooms, like my own, currently a sanctuary commemorating the first 20 years of my life - medals, trophies, old photos, and trinkets that hold random memories, some gaining others losing their sentiment.The subject today was a bowl, laid out on a blue cloth-covered table, containing an unorthodox blend of fruit, root and veg. A pale yellow lemon rubbed rind with a branching clove of garlic. Alongside rested a reddish-green apple and in the forefront, I suspect was a sweet potato, although I would like to hope it was an overripe pear. I still don't know what this object was, but the purpose of today's exercise was to paint what you see - and we can't always trust our interpretation anyways. To the left of the bowl was a sweet red pepper - the longish kind. I decided to frame the painting so that I cut most of this out, as the angle of the pepper meant it probably would have turned out looking somewhat vulgar in my version. A semi-opaque plastic jug was set behind the bowl and in front of a draping backdrop that required shading in grey. This fed into the most important lesson today - grey is not a blend of black and white.
Grey is burnt sienna, white and a touch of blue (declared, like a child who just nailed the 12x12 times table).
