Vine Ripened

Vine Ripened

My Italian obsession continues with Vine Ripened! Painting all red subjects is a color mixing challenge because of the physical limitations of pigments. What does that mean? Specifically with these tomatoes, lightening red paint with white to get lighter tones and highlights gives you pink instead of light red. And white paint also has the effect of “cooling” color temperature which is bad in the case of painting tomato red-a color generally described as “warm.” What’s the solution? -using a warm light color to lighten the red. Here I used a combination of yellow ochre with white to get the lighter tones I needed to paint these tomatoes in 3D. This is an excellent example of how artists interpret nature’s incredible range of color with the limited means available to us. And here is where I believe an artist’s creativity and skill can best be evaluated-creating beauty from a challenging subject due to the inherent limitations of paint.