Still life with pink rose and silver tea pot demonstration.

This is a real long demonstration, a still life with pink rose and silver tea pot in oils on canvas.  I'm going to try to answer several questions that I get within emails from folks, so get that cup of joe and sit back for a few.

There are over 20 photos of this work, and I'll have to break it up into 2 pages.  So, here we go....

Our first photo:

At this stage, I've completed the imprimatura, which was very light, and the 1st and 2nd umber under-layer.  The ink lines are still quite visible with umber coming right up to the lines, and in some cases covering them.

This next photo shows the dead layer coming along nicely.

Here you can see on the silver tea pot, a little of the umber showing through. The reflections within the base of the tea cup and leaf are done.  Silver and chrome are not difficult as long as you remember a few things.  Highly reflective surfaces have very sharp reflections.  You don't have to duplicate all of them, just enough to make it convincing.  The darkened area actually had me standing in the reflection, but the rest was mostly dark, so, since I would be a distraction to the rose, I painted myself out!

A close up of the detail that is included at this stage.  As this is a major component (the leaf) of the composition, I take my time to get it right at this point!

At this stage, I've laid in the major gray masses as the details are very fine at this point, and I only want to capture the modeling, shadows, half shadows of the porcelain cup and saucer.

I've allowed the underlying drawing to show through quite a bit on the cup as the color layers will completed the finer details of the intricate designs on its sides.

In this photo above, I've laid in a color mass as a reflection of firelight on the cloth.  I've also laid in darker masses and lighter masses of color on the linen to accentuate the folds.

Using the dry blending brush, I have feathered the edges out on these color masses, and then softly blended further with the mop brush so that the fireplace reflection is barely visible.

More color added to the linen folds in the front.

And further blending with the dry blend brush, and mop brush to soften the entire passage.

To continue with this still life with pink rose demo, click on the link below to get to the final color layers and some nice closeups of the pink rose.

Click here to go to page 2 of this demo

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