Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Popcorn and Oil

oil on linen on panel / 7x5" /unframed / sold


How this painting will look framed:

Popcorn and Oil was a delight to paint. This painting was a lesson in edges. I loosely painted in the shape for all the popcorn pieces and the bottle of oil. Onto the cool white mass of popcorn, I applied warm white paint heavily (impasto) to pull out the shape of selected pieces of popcorn. Notice whereever there is impasto, the edges are hard-bringing that portion of the popcorn forward giving the popcorn pieces dimension.

The challenge was to maintain the shimmer of the oil in the bottle and make the bottle look glass-like, a  liquid and a solid. The top left side of the bottle almost disappears (a soft edge) into the background. The top right side of the bottle is very solid looking (hard edge). To keep the viewer's eye away from the edges, I placed a highlight on the glass to draw the viewer's attention to the bottle. To keep the oil looking liquid-like, I painted very soft golden edges.

Are the edges convincing?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Mee Li.
You work is Beautiful. It is reminiscent of different era.
Thank you for sharing the virtual tour of your collection with me.
Cornelia (Neil) Davis