My first painting measures 11” x 14” and is composed using an analogous harmony. The colors I used are red-red violet-violet. I chose this color scheme because I wanted to keep the radishes a reddish hue. I used a very light wash on the negative space to give it a set back feeling. The background has lower chroma than the foliage or the radishes. I tried to keep the chroma high in the foreground. I think the visible brush strokes in the bottle give it character. The edges on the bottle and around the foliage are much harder than the edges of the radishes. I think this piece looks finished and once I wiped out the background it looked good.
My second painting also measures 11” x 14” and uses a split complimentary color scheme. I chose to keep the radishes red but the foliage is a mix of blue-green and yellow-green. There were a lot of shadows in this composition; the focal point of the painting is a small radish in the middle of the canvas with a cast shadow across it. There isn’t much negative space in this painting because it’s such a close up view. There are some very dark spaces that are shadow in which I tried to only use a light ash over the undertone. The chroma is very high in the lighted areas and very low in the shadows. The radishes have a good sense of being a round form and the leaves look like their flatter. The edges of the vegetables and foliage are soft, while the shadows have hard edges. I don’t think this painting has a very good sense of space.
My last painting is quite larger and has a very different composition using only two large radishes. I think this one works the best because I used a different method on the painting. I did the radishes with a lower chroma on the shadowed edges and lower chroma in the foliage under the radishes. I also did the foliage in a more abstract way then I’d used in the two previous paintings. There is a huge value range from bright yellow to a very dark green. It works well because there is a lot of light in the painting and shadows being cast because of that. I think this painting works better than the second because in the second the radishes look like they’re floating, here they look like they’re resting on the foliage. I used harder edges on the lighted sides of things.
