Strawberries - Oils

For this painting, my intention was to show a plate of strawberries and a knife in a simple way. I accomplished this by using oil paints on canvas paper. My painting is about texture, color, color reflections, and dramatic shadows. The most difficult part about creating this piece was laying out everything and capturing all the different colors and reflections I saw in real life. It was tricky to find the right mix of colors to do the strawberries and the shadows. I faced all these challenges by studying my subject closely and squinting my eyes to make the colors blurry. My painting works in the leaves of the strawberries. It's a tiny thing, but I like how they turned out and I think they look very simple and cute. The dark shadows also look nice. Some things I have learned were capturing reflections of colors and creating more depth in a painting. My mentor for this painting was Peggi Kroll. From her, I learned about different colors you can mix to create grays and other neutral colors. Another artist from the class that I learned from is Soy. I love how much care and effort he puts into his paintings and I hope I can become more calm and light-hearted like him while I paint. If I had to do-over anything, I would add more light reds and yellows to the strawberries. I feel like they look too solid. I feel best about how I added the shadows and merged everything together in the painting.