This painting was done over about three class periods in an oil painting class I just finished at a local college. I do not do still life paintings much at all, so this was a good exercise for practice. The composition was a generic one set up 'in the round' so that the students could set up in a circle around it and each paint a different view. Consequently, the composition is a little jumbled and I had no control over it. However, I am thinking it would have been more artistic to crop in the section I painted a bit to develop a more interesting composition - instead, I opted for the practice to paint all the objects as they were there. The unusual colors that do not closely reflect the local (actual) color of the objects were used as part of the assignment. We were to use only three colors in a "split complementary" color scheme. The three I chose were YELLOW - RED-VIOLET - BLUE-VIOLET. We could change value (light and dark) as much as we wanted in that range, and neutralize ('dull down') the three colors to a brown neutral, but no other colors were allowed. That was a great exercise in using a limited palette and learning how to mix neutral colors from only a few colors - the range of hues actually avaiable from only three colors when values and intensities.
