Exercise: Working with greys and browns

Still life exercise focusing on the monochrome, introducing a single patch of colour for contrast. Preferred still life (apples on stripped tea towel) produced in the previous exercise but this has more to do with the less contrived composition than the colour choices.

Compositional studies:

Colour studies:

Final painting:

Position of the patch of red possibly not best placed in the foreground...


Article in the Artist & Illustrators (February 2014) entitled Chinese watercolours which showed examples of the winner's work from the Shenzhen International Watercolour Show (http://www.shenzhenbiennial.com). I was reading this article at the time I started this exercise, was drawn to one of the pictures that one an excellence prize that in many ways met the brief of this exercise (replacing the toy with several patches cerulean blue, decoration on tea pot) Ren Hui, Flowers Thinking Language