Still Life with Copper Pot

This is from still life class. Here is Chui setting up the composition and explaining it. 

He's saying that you have to find the darkest part of the composition, and compare that and use it as a reference for the rest of the light/dark, as well as the lightest part of the composition. He's also pointing out the warm vs. warmest colours  and that we should compare these to the colder. He says that we should use the apples as reference colour also; he notes that the coldest part of the composition is the inside of the spout of the copper pot, which is a cold Prussian blue-grey. He says "il faut faire les croquis;" we must work on our draughtsmanship,  drawing. To also compare relative size of the objects. The first night, we sketched out the still life with burnt sienna and solvent. Chui corrected each of our compositions  where needed. It was hard at first to figure out how to correctly fit everything into the canvas space. From a picture, it seems so obvious. Harder to do free-hand.

This photo was taken by Denise, it's the second night that we worked on these. Mine is second from the left. Chui kept telling me that my pottery pot needed more cadmium yellow. He has an amazingly accurate eye for colour  as did my dad. The top reflection of the pottery is light purple, which I really didn't see, with darker purple for the shadows on that pot. Underneath the copper pot's spout is crimson and blue, very dark which Chui mixed and applied and it made it more 3 dimensional.

And then the third night:I had a bad time with the drapery. Mine's second from the left. It's hard to get into doing it until the last night, because it is different every time we set up the objects. In fact everything moves around a little from session to session.

The reflection flare in the pot is a series of colors each mixed with white. Cadmium yellow and white, cadmium red with white, and orange with white, all very pure.There is a lot of ochre at the top, and violets in the reflections towards the left. The inside of the pot is very cold blue. A lot of crimson in the handle's reflection. The reflection of the apples is a lot of crimson and some blue as well.

Still life with roses

This is from a still life class. The roses were fake, which is too bad, but nothing lives for 3 weeks and we don't work that fast. As usual, I am stymied by the drapery. Apparently, the old masters would devote whole classes and paintings to drapery. At one point I told Chui "mon nature mort est mort" and he added some shadows and said "Je l'ai ressuscité." I wanted to note is a small detail: the shadow in the roses was mixed from red- scarlet lake and burnt sienna, and it gave depth to the flower.   He says mix a maximum of 3 colors to keep the colors pure. He corrected my work and added purple grey shadow to some of the petals, which I couldn't see myself, looking at the flowers. 

The composition:

What I did over 3 classes. At the end of our class he came over to mine and added gilt of the gold on the cup, and one tiny highlight on the vase, which enlivened the painting.

Everyone's work all together. Chui compared our works one to each other.  Mine's on the floor at far right, and my brother's is next to it.