The thing that's tricky with eggplant is the leaf thingy/stem has nowhere near the amount of contrast or richness that the body does. In other words it looks flat. So with the painting I took a bit of artistic licence and added some bolder colors so in the painting the leaves could hold there own.
A real life photograph can pull of things that a painting can't. If I left them alone and kept painting a pretty benign green-brown, it would look like there was something wrong with the painting, as opposed to the plant.
So what I did to help that out was I painted those leaves closer to sunset. There is a harsher shadow available, which gave me something to work with. I used dark browns but also a little bit of the watered-down purple that I did in the plant. Which really helps it hold it's own, and helps the leaves look like they belong on top of the eggplant. The photograph shown here was taken the morning after the painting, and in my kitchen under yellow-ish flourescent lights. Seee what I mean... your lighting changes everything.