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Three Fruits Study

We’re looking at small, speedy painting in this block of lessons. We’re concentrating on getting an idea of the subject across with minimum fuss, learning to paint what we see plus practice colour finding. Whether we like to paint in detail or loosely, this is a good exercise to do as it requires little time and is good practice for our more considered paintings.

The first session of the autumn block of lessons we tackled a simple still life of 3 fruits. To get a feel for the subject, we painted a tonal sketch of the fruits using white and raw number. This gave us an idea of the lights and darks and the shape and proportion of the fruits. After a break and a coffee, we dived in with colour. The tonal sketches were a helpful guide when adding the colour to make sure we maintained a good contrast between light and dark.

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