Books about painting flowers and trees are everywhere, but fruit and vegetables? Surely
they belong in the garden or the kitchen... A look into this lovely book will reveal
otherwise, and show the rose in every cabbage. Paintings reminiscent of early 19th century
botanicals rub shoulders with the more playful, modern studies and will surely make you see
fruit and veg in a new light.
A year or so back, I reviewed this author’s
Watercolour
Flower Portraits and was impressed, but it is easy to make flowers look good. Now
Ms Showell shows you how to get the most out of a wide range of fruit and vegetables. The
paintings leap off the pale backgrounds and manage to look luscious and juicy, show off
their interesting shapes and often their accompanying flowers. Of course there is the usual
shopping list of what you need, together with some hints as to how to use some ordinary
objects for art, as well as composition, working from photographs and keeping a sketchbook.
I like the color mixing-section that instead of blobs shows appropriately colored vegetables
(yellow bananas for example) and the playful compositions that make "still life" seem more
lively and less still. There are lots of examples to work though, showing how to make lemons
look knobbly and aubergines (eggplant to Americans) shiny, to name two examples, as well as
longer studies to copy with staged photographs. I particularly liked the section on painting
white vegetables on white paper and making them stand out, and overall I think you can learn
a lot of "tricks of the trade" from this book that you can apply to many other types of
painting. This is an impressive primer, and suitable for a wide range of abilities.
If you cannot find a good range of watercolors and other art materials locally try
SearchPress.com for a list of suppliers.