Theme for the Week: FRUIT

This week's theme is FRUIT -- always accessible and so much fun to draw and paint, with their beautiful colors and shapes.  And, you can eat it when you're finished with your paintings.

We'll have sketchbook assignments and examples, one or two tutorials for painting fruit, as well as my top ten list of favorite fruits to paint, with examples.

Abundance, watercolor by Pat Howard

Colors are even named after fruit, or was it the other way around?  Lemon Yellow, Cherry Red, Apple Green, Blueberries, Oranges, Plums . . . 

Fruit and Shadows, watercolor by Pat Howard

We're so accustomed to seeing these fruits at our grocery store, farmers' markets, and fruit stands, we hardly notice how marvelous they are, until we start looking at them as the basis for a drawing or a painting.  If you can find some with the stalks and leaves still attached, so much the better.

Still Life with Hawk, watercolor by Pat Howard

Just remember -- when you set up a still life with fruit -- to tell people that you are drawing or painting the fruit, so they don't think you just set it out for them to snack on.

My family learned pretty quickly, but I once was painting with a group of artists in a hotel lobby in Santa Fe, where we had set up a still life that included a big bowl full of apples.  We had been painting for about an hour, when a lady -- a guest at the hotel -- walked by and helped herself to one of the apples and immediately took a big bite out of it.  She was totally oblivious to the 6 or 7 artists painting at their easels and staring at her.  We just started laughing . . .