"jim's decoy with daisies" next step

late yesterday i did have a little more time and sneaked into the studio just to take a look at the current painting and one thin led to another and, well.......you know. so here are the next small steps in the process of painting this opus.

i used my #8 round brush for all of these next steps. the decoy head was painted using hooker's green and ultramarine blue mixed wet-in-wet on the paper. i left a little highlight for the eye but lost it in the end so i will have to amend this somehow in the future. yellow is one of the hardest colors for me (and a lot of watercolor painters) to darken and not have it go dead. using the complement violet is asking for mud. green can work or one of the cooler darker yellows like raw sienna or umber. here i chose to go with quinacridone gold as it is at least a couple of values darker right out to the tube as when it is diluted down. so, i started the stoke in the lower left and went up and around the highlight and back down from whence it started in sort of and elongated oval shape. after tidying up the highlight i loaded the brush with a good glop of quin. gold and starting at he bottom worked my way up to eventually blend with the first stroke (which was cadmium yellow medium). the cast shadow was put in right away with cobalt blue. the same colors were used for the lemon wedge on  the cutting board but i tried to add some olive green to the shadow side....not as happy with that decision but i will let it stand. the cast shadow was put in wet-in-wet with cobalt blue as usual. the pepper was painted with strokes of alizarin crimson permanent, brown madder, and cadmium red light being careful to maintian some of the white bits of paper to help describe the shape. the stem end was done with olive green and oxide of chromium. guess when the cast shadow of cobalt blue was added?

i am always adding bottles last as sort of an after thought and have them look like it. in this instance i wanted to take some time and not at the end to do it  better than in the past. these can be fun to paint if one pays attention to the light reflections which really are the most important thing out side of the overall shape. i used alizarin crimson perm. and brown madder for the label on the neck and olive green and quin. gold for the glass part of the bottle. i tapered this off as i wanted to finish it later...time was getting late. i felt that i needed a bit of color coming in from the upper left and put in my trusty combination of cerulean blue, alizarin crimson perm., and raw sienna, splattered on and manipulated a bit. the knife blade was painted wet-in-wet with ivory black, cerulean blue and a bit of cobalt blue (i think). the cast shadow which also needed a step off at the edge of the cutting board is cobalt blue. the edge of the cutting board in shadow is raw umber with the cast shadow cobalt blue (what else?).  lastly, i added the stripes with a darker ultramarine blue out front and working back to a lighter and grayer cobalt blue (with a little raw sienna) as i moved back into the painting.