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Natalie's Pumpkin - Original oil painting by George De Chiara

By George De Chiara on 10/16/2011 10:33:48 PM Comment on this

Natalie's Pumpkin

Last year, I painted one of these small pumpkins and named it after my then one year old daughter, so it only seemed fitting that I use my newest daughter's name for this year's small pumpkin painting. She's way too young (2 months old) to have actually picked out this pumpkin, but it's the smallest one we have this year and it seemed fitting to name it after her. What attracted me to this little one was the stem. I loved that it had that little stringy bit and that I could pose it almost any way I wanted to for my painting. I had to be careful though; I accidentally broke off one of the little vines off of it while working out this arrangement.

Below is how today's painting came to life:

First off, this photograph will show you what I was looking at while painting this today. I think I may have had my camera a little low when I took this image, but it's close. You might notice that I simplified the bit of vine that's still on the pumpkin in the painting. In the end, I felt that was just too busy and went with a simpler version of what was there.

This image was taken at the end of my rough block-in. Yes, it's very rough at this stage, but I wanted to see if I could keep things a little looser in the beginning and still get the result I wanted. With that in mind, I felt this was all the block-in I needed to before getting started with more defined painting.

I started with the pumpkin with large simple shapes once my rough block-in had dried a little bit. First, I defined the light areas and then the shadow areas. From there, I kept refining it by building up the form as I went along. I only painted the foreground colors when I needed to define and correct the outer edges of the pumpkin.