Painting or drawing metal is probably one of my favorite things to do, even though I rarely do it. I think the last time I drew metal, it was just a detail in my piece “I WISH YOUR HOUSE WAS REAL.” So I was very excited when I saw a metal pot as an option to paint in Painting II. 

I have such a fascination with metal, particularly all the colors that can go into it. In my newest painting I added just about every color I could get away with adding. I honestly spent more time on getting just the right shades of yellow, or blue, into the shadows than I did on any other part of this piece. 

I typically will ignore everything else in a still life if I see a chance to draw/paint fabric, but the fabric in this one just really didn’t have enough of an “interesting” shape for me to want to paint it. I usually base my entire composition around the fabric, but I really couldn’t find a good shape to base the rest of the piece off of if I had done that. 

Especially compared to my last still life where I painted metal:

I think I really improved the rendering this time. I didn’t really quite capture the depth of the shadows in my last piece (because I was so obsessed with the fabric)

That’s why I had gone more so with the metal this time than anything else. I thought I could create a nice diagonal line from the metal to the apples, and connect it all to the fabric. Overall I feel okay with how this came out. I really wish I had more time to work on this. I really could only work on this in class, I like to spend a minimum of five hours outside of class working on art pieces but that just wasn’t an option this time. But that’s okay! I still really love this metal pot thing, and surprisingly I didn’t hate painting the apples as much as I had assumed I would.

~Ana