Interior Spaces: Peppers

Medium: oil paint

•  Since I already painted a pepper during the summer and really enjoyed doing it, I wanted to get some more practice in with peppers! The theme of this project was an interesting interior. By cutting a pepper in half, I felt like it created a pretty cool interior.  This project was a bit challenging because I wanted to capture the highlights and water drops on the peppers. I really like how this painting turned out, it’s bright and cheery and is fun to look at!

Did you gain skill with familiar materials?

Since I have already done a few paintings with oil, I felt pretty confident with what I could produce as an artist. Even though I already painted in oils, I gained some new skills! Oil paint is easy to dull the colors by adding too much white, so I learned how to lighten my paint up with other colors like cream and tan. Through this experience I learned how to lighten colors without taking away from my painting or distracting the audience with too many light sections of the painting.

Also, I learned how to fade the colors into each other to make the peppers as realistic as I could. By taking similar colors and blending them together and mixing the shadows and the darker sections of the pepper together, I felt that I created a realistic transition throughout the painting.

Did you consider how ideas would work before you tried them?

I considered and practiced what the peppers would look with a purple background before making the final decision for this project. I wasn’t sure at first what color to make the background, but I felt that the violet did a good job creating contrast. With that in mind, I did a practice sketch with a light blue paper a prism color pencils to see how the red would look. Since I really didn't like the blue I stuck with the purple. I didn’t want to go very dark with it because I felt that it would make things look too dim and I really wanted this painting to be bright and cheery.