still life setup and studies

I like to learn how to paint still life so I made a setup in my room with a cardboard box, some cloth, a daylicht lamp and a bowl and apples and such. I made some photos and altered them in Paint Shop to find a suitable size and compositon and I have made a lot of sketches.
And I made a couple of studies with apples and glass objects.

oil painting, little girl reading, first color layer

Finally, I could not wait so I added the first color layer to her face and neck.
That was soooo difficult and of course I am not satisfied.
In real on her forhead there is too much green and her face is too yellow.
So when it is completely dried I have to work on her face again and also her hair has to be more detailed.
But till it is dry I can work on the other parts of the painting and I am alsostudying hard with composition and still life and making sketches and such.
Today I will place a lot of pictures of all my work of the last couple of days.
This picture is large, click on it to see all the details.

oil painting, little girl reading, next step

The grey tone underlayer is almost finished. I have to paint the arms, legs and background with grey tones and also her blouse has to be more white.
But then I can start to put some color on the canvas.
Very exciting! This is the very first time that I will do this technique and I am so afraid to ruin all my work.
So I will take some canvasboard and put, just like on the painting, the same color underlayers on it so I can practise color layers before I will add color on to my painting.
In real the little girl is longer, my camera shorten the picture.
It does not show the right dimensions unfortunately.
I have not discovered how to prevent this.

oil painting, little girl reading, grey layer

Just an update, I have some parts painted with a layer of tones of grey. A lot of work has to be done though. The whole canvas will be painted in tones of grey before I will add color.

water color still life study

For this still life study I used not satin/smooth paper but a more rougher surface and I like it!
Untill now I had so much trouble with working with such kind of water color paper, but I think that it helped a lot that I have painted with oil color the last month(s).
This is only a study in working with water color but also with composition and such. The white you see is the white of the paper, I did not use white paint.

I have so much difficulties with backgrounds and composition. I have purchase a beautiful book about composition and I just received it. I can really recommend this book, it is called: "Mastering Composition by Ian Roberts". A beautiful illustrated book, I only looked through it but it seems to me that it will be a great help to me.

oil painting, little girl reading, second layer

This painting is the largest size I ever drew or painted on! 60x40cm
The second underlayer is painted and tomorrow I will start to put the first
dead layer on.

drawing breakfast for art journal

This excercise is to try to draw round forms in perspective.
Not quit right yet, I keep practising!
But it was nice to draw again.

oilpainting 2 sisters, finished

Finally the painting of the two sister is finished.
I decided not to put colorlayers on top of the so called deadlayer.
I like it the way it is right now.
In real the painting have lots of different tones of grey and so much more detail.
The underlayer of raw umber is looking through and gives the painting more a lifely look and more depth.
I think that I will use this method also for other paintings.

I already started another painting, a big one this time and also made by the same painter.
It is still a very rough sketch with some tones.
For the first time I used a grid, but I found it a lot of work and I did not like this method.