Color and Light : Green Tomatoes 3

It's silly time! After doing a study with reference, then a painting from memory, it's time to really go wild. I'm choosing to make some pretty goofy shapes here. @bambuka commented that my last tomatoes looked like aliens so I'm leaning in pretty hard to make a couple of these look like faces. Creepy!

Here's my sketch. I'm trying to honor the "tomato" shape but add in some fun shapes to explore. I figure that if I understand the material enough, I should be able to get the lighting right on both a cube kind of shape, a tube shape, and the gourd shape that is kind of like two spheres connected by a cylinder.

When choosing my base colors I wanted to again get some variety of green into my painting. I've opted to go a bit cooler/bluer in the back and bring it up to a warmer/yellower green toward the front.

I know that I am going to get the light from the left side so I am leaving that a little brighter and I want to make this feel dangerous, so I'm playing in some reds into the background.

To get the spooky effect of alien tomatoes, I decided to try for a light that was coming from the bottom left like a campfire ghost story moment. This gives me a chance to explore all those weird shapes. As usual, I am going about halfway toward black and adjusting the hue a little bit to a cooler color.

For the light side I am going toward the warmer/yellow hue and moving about 70% of the way to white. This gives a nice contrast from the cool side and elevates the "green" ness of the tomatoes.

The areas that the light cant reach will get very close to black so underneath the tomatoes needs to go pretty dark. I also noticed that the direction of the light would throw some cast shadow onto the gourd tomato.

Highlights! I remembered that I needed to get that "waxy" look for the tomato so I threw a pretty light sheen onto larger areas and added little bright spots where I thought the shape would be the most aimed directly at the light.

Bounced light is going to bounce from the ground plane and put that light cream color onto the tomatoes and the tomatoes will throw some of their green onto the floor. Notice that on the top left edge of the big tomato's upper walrus lip I've added a subtle bounced light from the highlight zone to kind of carve out that shape.

Last but not least we take a trip down the sky light path. Light blue from the sky will hit the top right sides in the shadow and also a little bit will sneak into the shadow shapes of the ground.

I decided that it's all about the highlights again so I've softened areas that aren't getting hit by light and around the edges where I don't want people to look. I'm pretty stoked about this one, I think it's rad!

After all that, I feel like we've grown a lot! We started out with a study which was probably the most painstaking. @ezunjoshy did an excellent study here. Next up, we painted our subject from memory, Green Tomato 2, which really pressed our brains to come up with the solutions we learned from the study phase. Then last off we went ultra silly which forces our brain to create an entirely new memory for tomato because it's not anything that exists.

In this way we are creating a string of information that we can use the next time we need to paint something waxy. It's become reinforced by the repetition and we've used our imagination which is even more powerful tool to increase our memory. I'm feeling pretty confident after doing these paintings that I could fairly easily paint a tomato if someone asked me to in the future.

I you want to go over how I made some of these color choices in this study you'll find a [basic primer here.]
(https://steemit.com/hive-185836/@fumansiu/color-and-light-an-appreciation-of-our-colorful-world)

If you'd like to get started with color studies we've got yellow and green now ready to go!
Yellow Bananas
Green Tomatoes

If you need help getting started drawing, I highly recommend you head over to @jorgevandeperre's blog and start following along his lesson plans. @jorgevandeperre has over 30+ exercises to get started and is even giving out rewards to students who complete homework!

Special thanks to @bambuka for making the alien comment, I had fun making these tomatoes look out of this world!