Above on the left, is the basket as I left it at my last session. On the right I’ve begun to work between the two large diagonal sections and the upper right portion of the basket. I’m pretty sure that the colors will need to be adjusted later, but at this point I just want to get some paint down. I’ve added some shadows and deepened the left side with another glaze. I also added some glazes and details on the stone and crystals.
Above you can see the results of my next session. After darkening the left side again with a glaze, I thought I was losing some details under all of the glazes. It also had a uniform, flat, washed-out look. To fix this, I applied thick strokes of wet paint over the glazed area to bring out some of the more important bamboo strips. This technique is called painting into a wet glaze, and it can bring dimension and texture to a flat glazed area. I’ve also begun to work on the rim of the basket
The wine decanter needed some work to catch it up to the rest of the painting. I found seeing all of the shapes very challenging, because the reflections are very complex. In the end, I just started at the top, going very slowly, comparing the canvas to the set-up, and trying to decide if it needed to be darker or lighter, warmer or cooler. Gradually, as I studied and applied some paint, I could begin to see more. The more one area is correct, the easier it is to judge the adjacent area.
I know I’ll go over this again and again, but it’s a lot closer than it was!
Next, it was time to work on the handle. A lot of this will be glazed over later to darken it. I could have simply painted it dark to begin with, but I think that a dark glaze over lighter paint mimics the look of a light object in shadow.
The colors didn’t seem quite right. No matter what pigments I mixed, the dark areas didn’t seem warm and rich enough! Maybe glazing over some of them when they dry with alizarin crimson might help. At my next session I’ll glaze the parts of the handle that need to be in the shadow.
Linda Mann Artist 