Pink Still Life

First: This is seriously pink in real life, but what can you do with that whole photo process, so frustrating. I tried to keep it all sort of dark and close valued, to crowd the forms and tie them to the bottom edge, leaving a big slab of space at the top for all that ----well, pink. Initially, I split that area in two and planned to use another red, more orange, in the top space, but it was interesting what that did to the composition - it made it unreadable as a whole image, so I had to consolidate and unify with the single pink. The plaid cloth I lifted straight from Catherine Kehoe's painting of a dishtowel, which is exquisite, and maybe the standard for all painted plaids in the entire galaxy. Click here. I worked the dishtowel a couple of times before this version above, putting in every check and line. Awful. Then I painted some checks and lines and shifted the values on every square. Finally, I painted the values of the cloth, then threw caution to the winds and jabbed in some lines. That worked best. I learned a lot on this painting.