It was a drippy Saturday afternoon and I spent my time in the company of a companionable nectarine. It was a lovely nectarine, chosen because it was one of only two fruits amidst a sea of vegetables and I’ll take a fruit over a vegetable any day. It faded from a lovely shade of dark red tinged with maroon into a cheerful yellow-orange speckled with tiny flecks of red.
It was my task to paint the nectarine with watercolors. My first experience with still-life of any kind came last month in a couple of drawing classes. Prior to the watercolor class this past weekend my only experience with painting involved filling in drawings with paints. I’d certainly never done any painting where the paint stands on its own merit.
What follows is a record of my time with the nectarine.
I started by emulating the suggestions and the demo of the instructor. First I sketched in a quick outline of fruit and shadow, keeping it off center for more visual interest (as she suggested). I painted in the shadow first with an emphasis on adding any kind of reflected color or interpretations of color I could see in the shadow. (I was delighted to actually see some purple hiding under the front edge of the fruit!). I’m pleased with the way the color washes fell in and blended with each other. I especially like the dusty rose mixed with the purple in the bottom of the shadow.
Next, I began putting color into the nectarine. I started on the dark side while my shadow was still damp to see if I could get any fuzzy softness between fruit and shadow. I didn’t yet understand the watercolor concept of working light to dark, and knowing I didn’t want my dark red to go across the whole fruit, I stopped where I wanted it to stop. Unfortunately this created a hard edge that there wasn’t really much coming back from by the time I got my lighter colors painted in. So the fruit isn’t blended well and it’s generally overworked. I also had trouble knowing how best to define the crease in the fruit. My application of the orange coloring behind the crease isn’t well blended.
At some point while I was working on the fruit my instructor came over and suggested that my shadow edges needed to be softer, as shadow edges are. She tried to soften them (those additional brush strokes on either side are hers), but unbeknownst to me I’d selected a highly staining pigment, so it didn’t blend well after the fact. I learned to keep an eye on my shadows so they don’t wind up with hard edges while also becoming better acquainted with the properties of this particular blue. Valuable lessons indeed!
Knowing when to walk away is the most difficult task of watercolor. It’s so easy to make messes and overwork areas. It will take a lot of practice to know when to keep working wet (and how wet) and when to wait for it to dry. But I didn’t feel like there was much more that I could do to improve this particular nectarine, so I began my second.
My primary aim was to take all I learned from the first attempt and apply it to my second painting. My feathered shadow edges are much more soft and interesting! I worked hard to blend my fruit shades better this time, but had difficulty with a runaway wash of water when I tried to soften an edge. That runaway wash is what created the greyish strip down the middle of my fruit. About this time, I realized that I’d forgotten to put in the reflected color into the shadow. By the time I did the shadow wasn’t wet enough so the pink pigments didn’t blend in with the blue.
Feeling like this nectarine was quickly becoming a wash, I decided to go for a stylized sketch approach for the whole painting and added in some loose, chunky brush strokes into the shadow and the lighter portion of the fruit. This allowed me to blend the pink pigments I’d dropped into the shadow that were just sitting there, while also rapidly finishing up the piece so I could move onto another attempt. This did not impress my instructor (although I maintain that it is a valid style choice and one that is up to the preference of the artist who just wants to loosely sketch a fruit to completion before starting the next). The hard lines under the fruit and in the seam wouldn’t have been my preference, but she was rushing me along to the next painting, so I didn’t take the time to soften or blend them.
For the third iteration, she had me try the softer watercolor paper that I hadn’t been able to find at the store. She gave me a sample of hers and I started on the nectarine again. She asked me to fill up more of the page with the fruit. I worked on getting the coloring of the first painting with the softened shadow-edges of the second painting. This was a valuable exercise because this paper behaved much differently! My shadow bled all over the place (including what was meant to be a purple highlight which then blossomed into a distracting blob) and my fruit, while better blended, also ran all over the place including into my reserved white for the seam, and into my shadow.
By this time I was running into the end of class, so I didn’t have a chance to try to blend any of the things that bothered me about this fruit. I also wanted to add some speckled reds into my yellows because I thought they were too bright. I attempted to throw some last minute speckles on with my paintbrush, but my fruit was still too wet for it to show very well, and I didn’t have enough pigment on my brush.
At the end of class we hung all of our paintings on the wall for critique. From far away, my first nectarine translated the best (I just love the well defined form created by that highlight!), which isn’t a surprise, because I think it translates the best up close too. We left them hanging overnight and it was helpful to walk in the next morning and see them with fresh eyes. My first nectarine, the one that I felt so down on because of the hard edge transitioning from the maroon to the red, and my hard shadows that my instructor drew brushstrokes on the edges of, continues to be my favorite. Furthermore, I don’t mind my second nectarine either! I rather like its loose, rough, sketchy quality!
I think that the reason I feel most drawn to these first two is because they feel like they’re mine. I did them the best I knew how with the information I had and my current skill-level and they feel like a reflection of me. The third nectarine feels like a reflection of my instructor. I did everything she asked of me, to the best of my ability and with the limited time I had, and it just feels too loose and runny and frankly, kind of gross and muddy to me. It doesn’t make me happy.
So, all in all, it was a valuable exercise in which I got to enjoy some lovely time with a nectarine, learn about the different qualities of watercolor paper, and learn some skills for getting results closer to what I want (and tips for avoiding pitfalls into the things I don’t want). But it was also an affirming exercise in understanding a little more about what does and doesn’t feel a part of my personal style and embracing my personal preferences as a valid form of expression.