Day 26: Paint Fall Fruit in Cornucopia

Hi! Welcome to Day 26 of my 31 Days of Easy Holiday Paint Projects. If this is your first time visiting, I’ll admit that this cornucopia filled with fruit doesn’t look too, um, . . . easy.

But it’s really just a culmination of a bunch of tutorials:

• Cornucopia
• Apples
• Sunflowers
• Pears
• Pomegranates
• Grapes
• Pumpkins
• Fall Leaves
• Cattails
• Wheat Stalks

You could add any fruit you want and take out any you don’t want! It’s totally up to you.

 

I painted each fruit just as I outlined in each tutorial, for the most part.

In the above pic, all the elements are basecoated, but not detailed, highlighted, or shaded.

First I added some Raw Sienna to the sunflower and pear. Raw Sienna is a great shading color for yellows. I also lined the leaves with it.

Then I did some highlighting with Lemonade on the pumpkin, apple, pear, pom & sunflower. The leaves were lined with Lemonade right next to the Raw Sienna vein.

Here’s a close-up of the pumpkin stem which was highlighted with Lemonade to add the appearance of ridges.

These highlights were done with White – the grapes, pomegranate arils, apple, and pear.

Ok, here’s where I varied from the tutorials a bit. Artistic license, right?

Instead of topcoating the white highlights with the basecoat color, I used a lighter shade – Cardinal Red. It’s actually the same shade as the apple. I used 3 layers of Cardinal red – the first two on the top of each grape.

The 3rd layer was painted right in the center of the grape.

The grapes were finished with some tiny curved white highlights to accentuate their roundness (something I neglected in my video tutorial).

But it still looks a little flat, doesn’t it?

Yeah, now comes my absolute favorite part of painting – shading!

I started with the apple because it sits ‘behind’ everything else. A little shading with Burnt Umber and now it makes sense to the eye.

The pumpkin, pear, pomegranate and leaves were all shaded.

Now there’s some dimension to the painting – just with a little highlighting and shading. Do you see why shading is my favorite part of painting?

Ok, my friends, that’s the end of Halloween & Fall for this year. Tomorrow I start in on Winter & Christmas. Here are the tutorials I have planned:

• Birds & Branches
• Pinecones & Pine Boughs
• Snowmen
• Reindeer
• Gingerbread Men
• Poinsettias & Classic Christmas
• Holly & Berries
• More Snowmen
• Stars & Flourishes

But these aren’t cast in stone. If there’s anything in particular you’d like to see painted, or know how to paint, I’ll do my best to break it down into steps. Now’s your chance! Let me know in the comments.

We’ll also do some more fabric painting, glass painting, and maybe some iron-on transfers so you’ll be all set to decorate and make some beautiful gifts!

One more thing – a huge Thank You to everyone who has been so supportive during this challenge. You’ve made it unbelievably fun for me and I couldn’t have done it without you. Mwah!