Now it's time for the weird part: the "structured drawing" and "painting through."
Both of them look like I've ruined my painting! It's almost mortifying to even post this picture at this stage. Lots of artists, in fact, skip this stage. Some people don't even know about it, but even when you DO know about this step, it's really hard to make yourself do it.
You can see in the picture that I have painted some of the background color back OVER the vase and fruit, and furthermore I have drawn lines on the vase and even drawn some of those lines over the fruit. This is not because I can't control my brush and accidentally got paint all over the vase and the fruit. This counter-intuitive mess is crucial to achieve the illusion of light, depth and form that I want to get in the painting. You see, to make the vase look like it's curving back into the background, I need to put background color into the edges of the vase. And in order to get the shape of the vase to look three-dimensional, I need to "draw through" the fruit.
Tomorrow I'll post a picture of the result. It'll look good. Trust me, I'm a ... an artist.
Part of what makes Ariel so different is that he often sees these posts and is like, "Yeah, and? What's the weird part? OBVIOUSLY she had to draw through." While other times he will argue for a half-hour about whether something is green or not.
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