Eggshells and bowl

8″x8″ oil on gessoboard

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No matter how much colour is used in a painting, it is the tone that brings it together so I like to paint things without much colour and in similar tonal range now and then to practise this theory.  i bought this bowl at Forge 2 the other day when I was dropping off some paintings.  It is by Stuart Carey and it is a thing of beauty and simplicity.

Stage 1

I started, as always, drawing in my subject with a brush loaded with a weak turpy paint, making sure I didn’t plonk things bang in the middle of the board.  I also added some colour to where the shadows would fall as they always have colour in them.  Next I put in the major tones, aware that they would need adjusting as I went.  Basically, the journey through a painting should be a constant comparison of tone against tone.

So from here on in it was a question of doing just that, noting that the lightest tone was inside the left-hand

Stage 2

shell and the ruck in the cloth. I also wanted to make sure I kept all the small areas of light that shone through and provide areas of interest including through the broken shell on the left and behind the middle shell.  I left a few flecks of blue and red in places.