I have been wanting to push myself just a little bit further in the direction of abstraction in my still life paintings. I decided that a small 5"x 7" gouache on acid free paper would be the way to begin. What did I do? First, I decided (after many hours of setting up a still life) that my focus would be the fruit in the front of the painting and that everything else would be subordinate. I then decided on a palette. I wanted to create an expressive color scheme that came intuitively. I chose the pink background. Rather than laying out a carefully constructed drawing I worked directly on the paper using paint and tackled shape after shape after shape. I felt that creating a drawing first would feel too much like paint by number or just coloring in the shapes. I like the loose rendition of the drawing and tried to leave my choices clean and unadjusted. There were some areas when I had to go back in a little bit. I am so pleased with the results. I will try a few more before I try a much larger size painting. SUCCESS!
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