"Raspberry Mascarpone"

Sold

"Raspberry Mascarpone"

5 x 7 in

Oil on Canvas Panel

I've been gone for a little while without painting, there has been so much going on.  Went away up north with friends and had more friends visiting from out of the country, had to entertain for the most part.  Finally today everyone has left and I'm able to get back to painting.  I should've painted something simpler to get back to the groove, instead I dove in with something complicated.  The first painting back from a long hiatus is always the ice breaker, now to just keep the vibe going.

I started with the usual dry brush approach just getting the drawing down, after the drawing is done I started modeling all the raspberries from middle to darker values.  The reason I did this is to have an overall feel of the raspberries, I'm not straying away from the finishing each section at a time method.  I'm using ultramarine blue, alizarine permanent, cadmium red light and cadmium red deep.

Then I added the lighter middle values to make the overall forms turn, I just used cadmium red light for the lighter values.  Then I changed up the usual process and stated the background, I used cerulean blue, naples yellow and titanium white.  I wanted to add the background this early in the painting to deal with edges better and have the background color bouncing off the raspberries.

At this point I start taking each section to a finish, going from one raspberry to another.  I'm using titanium white, cerulean blue and cadmium red light for the lighter values.  While I'm going lighter with the values I'm also stating the smaller forms and making sure they are working with the larger forms.  It gets tricky at this stage to understand and simplify your shapes so they can work with the overall picture.  One can get caught up with details and forget the simplicity of  modeling the form.

Rendering raspberries is a challenge to say the least, you have to understand its textures and its complexities.  I'm also rendering the chocolate lining going in and out of the raspberries which makes it even more challenging to model the smaller forms.

Then I start on the chocolate lining of the base thats holding the raspberries together.  I thought at first it was paper but learned it was just chocolate hmmmmmmmmmmmm!  I added local colors of the chocolate and worked on just turning big forms first before adding smaller forms.  Once the bigger form was turning I added the smaller forms, my palette for this section consisted of ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, raw umber, yellow ochre pale, and titanium white.

This is the finished picture, I added the base and used yellow ochre pale, ivory black, ultramarine blue, titanium white, naples yellow, and cerulean blue.  This painting was a challenge overall but loved every bit of it, especially eating it afterwards.  Thanks for stopping by and viewing, hope you enjoyed!  Bon appetite!