Still life

I feel like I’ve been drawing more than painting recently, and since I went part-time to get better at painting, I decided to do a still life of an apple, based on the advice in this forum post.

It was a real struggle. This was my third attempt. My main problem was trying to accurately pick the colours. It’s incredibly difficult to match colours on your monitor with a colour in real life. In the end I just made approximations of all the colours I could see on the apple, put them all on a separate palette layer, and pushed through with the painting without worrying too much how accurate the colours were. The painting is probably a little too dark but I don’t think I would have got anywhere if I’d tried to match the colours exactly.

Squinting at the apple, so the all the various tints and shades of the apple merged into larger shapes, also helped a lot.

The yellowish section at the bottom of the apple was also difficult to paint. It is really made up of red dots. I think this sort of thing calls for a custom brush, but I don't have much experience with them. I tried using one of Photoshop’s default speckled brushes, but the effect wasn’t very convincing.

Overall though, I’m pretty pleased with my first digital still life.