I have wanted to try my hand at still life painting for a while now, but haven’t felt quite confident enough to take on the challenge on my own. It was in school last that I did any kind of still life painting so I was looking for support in the form of online courses or YouTube videos. I had almost instant success when I stumbled onto Will Kemp an award-winning professional artist and teacher.  His website is filled with professional art secrets, insights, tips, and lessons.  He has an engaging way of teaching art and most important of all he is passionate about his subject and it shows! So if any of you are interested in learning to draw or paint or improve what you do already, do yourself a favour and have a look at his site!

In this exercise the idea was to use a limited palette of two colours – Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna and white.  I will be honest, I found this exercise extremely challenging.  It forced me to work with what I had in order to create a shape with the correct balance between warm and cool and light and dark.

The idea was to use contrasting colours.  Orange is the contrast of blue on the colour wheel and Burnt Sienna is in the orange family, just quieter than the more obvious vibrant orange.

The first thing I did was prepare my canvas with a coloured ground.  This ground is painted over the white canvas to create an under layer for the painting itself.  This particular ground is a mixture of Raw Umber and Titanium White.

Then I drew out the image.

After the basic preparation I was ready to block out the light and dark tones on the canvas.  I mixed a dark brown from the ultramarine blue and burnt sienna and began blocking the darker tones onto the canvas. Then I added the light areas. For the background I used a muted blue adding touches of white and burnt sienna here and there so it was a little more interesting. That done, I went back to the jug and used the burnt sienna to begin creating the actual shape and colour of the jug.  By mixing white into the burnt sienna I could cool the colour down and paint in some of the lighter areas. Finally I checked the tonal values with the photograph and made adjustments and lastly added the brighter white highlights to complete the painting.

It’s not a difficult subject to paint, but painting only with two colours… I found it surprisingly challenging. That said, I had such fun I couldn’t put my brush down!

I received the following feed back from Will Kemp on the completed jug: