Windowsill Works Once More

Over the past couple of years I've resurrected some old windowsill works that I'd forgotten about and I've painted a few more in casein. Here are some of them.

This is casein, 4x6 on panel. I did it over an old, failed metalpoint drawing. I think it's a small silver creamer or perhaps a vessel to pour chocolate. In any event, it's a very shiny thing with a yellow metal interior and a handle on one side. I posed it near my studio window on a wrinkled red cloth then did my best to capture the essence, not necessarily the exact reality of the silver. As often happens, I let this one set overnight and adjusted the next morning for the final image.

This is a very quick study of a bud vase painted with a limited casein palette. Like the rest of these, it's 4x6 and was painted in less than an hour. When I paint glass, I try to lay in the background, then the far glass (if it's transparent), then the near glass, then any sheen (as on the shoulder of this bud vase), and last any highlights. This was posed on the windowsill of the studio too, but I invented the dark pillar behind it, for better value contrast.

I think that in both of these I was simply more interested in the ellipses and the reflections than doing a painting of the entire object.

Here's an oil on panel. For this and a series of similar studies, I filled differently shaped

bottles with transparent colored water. The goal was to study the transparency of the bottles and the transmission of color, using oil paint. This looks a little bit like an overturned ink bottle, seems to me.

Last, this is an oil study done in the same small format on a hardboard panel. It's an antique glass butter dish. This was enjoyable because of the limited palette and the need for accurate drawing. The blurring of the butter outlines made it even more fun.







Doing small works like these is useful because they can be completed fairly quickly. Further, because I don't have much time invested, if the image isn't useful I can always sand off the panel and re-use it.
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Previous posts on this topic
Windowsill Works
Windowsill Works 2
Windowsill Works 3
Windowsill Works 4
Windowsill Works Too