Art Exercise, Day 4; “My Cherries!”
(daily art exercise mentioned and first 3 here: http://stickypawz.livejournal.com/185027.html),

I now have a new fav... This one. This was the best tasting subjects of them all. Two very shiny and plumb cherries. Additionally, I love Alizarian Crimson, so versatile, so rich, and so mixable with other colors. Cobalt Blue is still my Fav color (for personal reasons), but reds can be so fascinating to use. I love the alla prima look of this one.
This one was done with the same 6 color palette (with Alizarain Crimson instead of Cadmium Red, on an 8” x 10” Masonite Board, but I did not stop when the timer sounded. I continued to work for another 15-20 minutes (I am so bad at the time limit thing)... Even though I feel I could have done more to this, I eventually did make my self stop. Who knew painting fruit was so interesting!

I feel like I can already see the difference in technical progress from the first one (http://stickypawz.timduru.org/Art/01DDegg.htm), to this one. The biggest help these daily exercises have done is with my feelings of comfort and confidence with using brush and paint (which believe it or not has been a continuing hindrance most of my artistic life), and with quickly assessing composition, and to a lesser extent color harmony. Oh, and the limited palette is forcing me to become less dependent on store bought colors straight from the tube. Okay, so 4 things...