subject: Oil Painting - The cloth and background [print this page] Oil Painting - The cloth and background Oil Painting - The cloth and background
Establish the correct color for the cloth and for the cast shadows on the cloth. We use a blue cloth, but you may have something different. Identify the local color of your cloth first, and then the analogous colors. Don't get fancy. The right answer to the question could be what you'd hear from a 5-year-old, "What color is it? It's blue." If your cloth is blue, refer to your color chart to help you mix the color on your palette. For our cloth, we use cerulean blue and ultramarine blue. Find all the blues, blue-greens, and blue-violets that may work for your cloth. The shadows cast by the objects onto the cloth are a darker version of the color of the cloth; they have nothing to do with the color of the object casting the shadow.
The lemon is a little tricky because its local color is cadmium yellow light right out of the tube, and that's the lightest color you have. Yellow is the lightest color on the color wheel, so it functions as the highlight. With yellow objects, you have to figure out which direction to move on the color chart to find the analogous color (a color similar to yellow) to create a shadow of yellow that looks like it belongs on a lemon. Paint the entire lemon cadmium yellow light, and then move on to the shaded side.
Your analogous color options are green and orange. When you look closely at the lemon on the shaded side, you notice that it looks greenish on the darker side. So use yellow for the highlight and yellow-green for the shaded side. Experiment with different greens for your lemon. You may have a tube of green, or you can make green using yellow and a blue either ultramarine or cerulean. You can try yellow ochre or some of the orange types of color, but the color may end up looking more like a squash than a lemon.
Don't worry about the effects of light on the cloth. If you're getting some shine off the material, just ignore it for this study.
Take the color of the cloth and the color for the cast shadows and apply them to the painting in a thin wash.
The final area you need to consider is any of the background that hasn't been painted yet. No matter what you see beyond your setup, you want to paint it very simply. For the purposes of this exercise, choose a dark, cool color, such as blue or blue-violet, and fill in the background with a thin wash.
