Understanding the effects of light

I would like to share with you an over view of this still life painting. I always found still life painting as the best way to learn the various aspects of painting. Still life teaches you to see shapes and to observe with your naked eyes the subtle changes in colour and tone. These two are usually miss-represented in photography as the camera is not able to see what your eyes and brain can. It also teaches you about composition since a still life is not simply a collection of objects as in a bazaar store. 

From the technical perspective every object will have a different difficulty how to approach it and how to apply the paint onto the surface. For this painting I chose a highly reflective metal tea pot, a tea cup, tea bag and a pear to include some colour. 

The overall big shape of the composition running between the main objects is a triangular shape with the string coming of the tea bag and hanging off the edge creates a very gentle leading line to the main subjects. The objects are painted almost the same size as the real objects and are partly touching or coming off the edges of the canvas. I did this specifically to make the viewer feel like being part of the painting. This is an approach Caravaggio used in a number of his paintings. 

The green background is the complementary colour to the red design on the cup and the purplish tag of the teabag complements the yellowish colours of the pear. 

As support I used a 30 x 30 cm cotton canvas attached to a wooden surface and pre-stained with a middle tone mix of alkyd oil burnt umber mixed with titanium white. The solid wooden surface protects the paint layers as it does not allow the canvas to experience repeated cycles of shrinkage as a result of the constantly changing atmospheric humidity. The light position for this still life was at the very top and I used a small neutral white light (5000k) 

The colour palette is as follows cremnitz white, titanium white, ultramarine blue, pyrrole rubine, burnt sienna, burnt umber, yellow ochre, Indian yellow and cadmium lemon. Paints are from Michael Harding, Blue Ridge, Old Holland, Gamblin and Williamsburg. Cold pressed linseed oil was used as medium added only in the second layer of paint.

Most of this painting was painted "Alla Prima" with only slight adjustments of tone and addition of detail onto the initial layer. I always start from the darkest objects, so here I started from the teapot. Most people have the impression that metallic objects are very difficult to paint, I find it the opposite. The teapot was painted using chromatic black (a mix burnt umber and ultramarine blue) adjusting and lighting up the value to almost a mid value grey. The reflections are painted with a low chroma version of the colours used for the objects being reflected. The contrast between values gives the illusion that the painted object is metallic. Still life painting teaches you to observe chroma and makes you realise how low in chroma are real objects around us. From painting the teapot I moved on to the background followed by the pear. The most challenging were the tea cup and tea bag that mainly consist of high value blue tint mixed with umber. The golden colour is a mix of burnt sienna, umber and Indian yellow from dark to light value. Painting the pear was an interesting and fun part of the painting because one can observe all the effects of light on a single object starting from the reflective  and shiny top part to the dark shadows and reflected light at the bottom coming from the background colours and the white cloth on the table.

The short video demonstrated the application of paint while painting the tea cup. Hope you enjoy.