Pearl Onion

Continuing with the simple graphite series., here's a little pearl onion.

On another note, since going Mac I've had all kinds of trouble with my Linksys wireless network. It seems that when either of my machines come out of sleep mode, I never know if I'll be able to reconnect or if the router will need a reset. Tonight I have a new Airport Extreme router by Apple. So far, so good.

Onion - It's A Wrap

That's it for the onions. I tried a third last night but my heavy washes just didn't work. Today I took my time with lighter washes and even tried masking a few edges to illustrate highlights. This last onion will probably be my course submission.

Next exercise is similar to this one, except that I get to pick the subject. I'm going to try a few tomatoes on the vine.

Onion Revisited

This evening, after taking critical notes for improvement, I took another try at the onion exercise. I'm pleased with cleaner edges, more even transitions (less blooming), and more accurately placed growth lines. Only thing is that I should have held back on the sienna washes over the blue. Instead, I ended up with overworked greens.



This is proving a fine learning exercise for me. By the way, this is the first demonstration exercise in Beautiful Botanicals by Bente Starcke King. We are asked to repeat this exercise until we are happy with our composition and colors. There might be another onion coming...

Bicolor Onion

The first exercise calls for painting an onion with only two colors, specified to be Raw Sienna and Phthalo Blue. Blue is to portray shadows. These two paints offered a subtle challenge--thalo stains while sienna lifts easily.