Garlic Still Life

I thought this would be fun to play with subtle colors: white on white, and all the slight tints in between. This painting is gouache on gray printmaking paper, and is 4.75 by 6 inches. It's also fun to play with the color opposites. Opposite colors on the color wheel are called complimentary colors (purple & yellow, red and green, and orange and blue).

I took a color workshop class in high school taught by landscape painter Dwane Sabistan. He followed a lot of the work of Wayne Thiebaud, specifically Thiebaud's use of colors to create the illusion of form. He waould use complimentary colors (one for shadows and one for highlights) which naturally fight each other visually, to really make objects in his paintings "pop." Not that this is the most in depth study of that practice, but since I learned it early on, it has been a natural tendency for me to do.

In the Garlic here you have the lighter parts in warm whites and even shades of yellow. The midtones are brown, and some of the darker areas are a cooler brown. But the darkest shadows are purples. The yellow tones throughout the lighter areas are more exagerated by the purple shadows. It also is a great solution for painting shadows without black. Black anywhere in a colored painting can cause the painting to look flat and not as rich. Using dark colors for shadows instead make for more of a rich, lively piece. Also it makes it so the shadows can hold their own against the highlights.