Painting 4 Still Life Colour Studies In Overcast/Diffused Lighting (Including One Street Scene)

Above image: My Still Life Painting Set Up By My Living Room Back Door, showing a bottle of wine, a piece of fruit, bottle of gin, with material set on top of the wooden floor. This was one of my first paintings.

Above image: The original photo of my still life set up

Recently I painted a number of studies from both inside my house, from the street, and also from the entrance of a local shop. I had to paint each study in an overcast or diffused light setting, and focus on the different textures of the materials in each scene, how they contrast with one another, and practice painting each texture so they are believable and distinguishable from one another for the viewer.

These studies were meant to be kept quite simple, painting with a large brush, and zoomed out. By painting in a diffused/overcast setting, the local colours of each object, and also the textures are much more easy to detect and paint. When you have a strong light source such as direct light from the sun, it becomes easy to lose the quality of the textures and also the local colours.

Painting in a diffused light setting is often what is requested of artists in the entertainment industry, as the information of the colours and textures is easily understood and passed along the pipeline towards 3D modellers, Lighting artists etc. So it's an important practice to do these overcast diffused light studies from life as much as possible.

I painted all of these in Photoshop.

Painting 2: Bathroom Sink

I placed a toilet roll, an almost finished piece of fruit, a golden plastic ball, and some kind of plastic container. This was my second overcast painting of the four. You can still see some of the highlight reflctions in the sink, and on the taps.

Painting 3: Brighton Street Scene

I didn't paint this scene from life, but I did take the photo on location and then paint it after. There was a tiny bit of light coming through the clouds, but in this moment the scene was overcast, which helped me to see the local value colours of the objects.

Above image: My photo reference I took on my walk home in Brighton which I painted from

Painting 4: A Box of Bananas

I walked past a local organic shop in Brighton where I live, and saw this box of bananas in the shop entrance. The main light source was coming from the sky outside, and at the time it was diffused lighting, so I decided to take a photo of the scene, bring it home and paint it later. This was the result!

Above image: The original photo reference I took on location in the local shop I came by in Brighton

Let me know what you think!

Thank you for viewing

Robbie