Pear #2 - final

Moving right along, here is pear #2:

This one is more yellow (oh joy) but managed to behave itself despite that fact.  I kept the washes very light and declared victory before I blew it.  What do you think?

One question I get asked often is how do I paint all the teeny dots without going stir crazy.  Well, I'll let you in on another studio secret.  If you look at a typical Bartlett pear, for example, you'll notice its surface is covered with about 10,000 speckles.  When I first noticed this I panicked.  How can I possibly paint all those spots?  Or should I even try?  The question arises in botanical art how far do you take the detail.  Yes, I could sit for hours and painstakingly paint each and every speckle I see.  To achieve the goal of botanical accuracy, one could make the case that painting every single dot is important.  Or one could let the powers of perception help out a little.  Our brain does an amazing job of decoding and sorting out the visual puzzles of life.  From very limited visual information, it can make conclusions and inferences about the size and shape and color and pattern and texture and approximate weight and depth of a thing.  In this case, I want to give the viewer's brain just enough information so it will conclude "Aha! The speckled surface of a Bartlett pear!"  And that turns out to require only about 300 dots, as it happens.  The brain fills in the missing 9,700 dots.  Yes, 300 is a large number, but compared to 10,000, it is nothing!

Try this: sit back in your chair and look again at the image above.  Not up close in a "Geez how did she do that?" way, but in a  slightly unfocused, relaxed way.  Keep your eyes moving kind of quickly around the picture, not stopping to focus on any one thing.  After a few seconds, your brain will (hopefully) start signaling, This is strange but there's a pear sticking out of your computer, or something to that effect.  It fills in any missing information to make sense of the picture.  It 'sees' a three dimensional, speckled Bartlett pear.  Accurately and convincingly capturing the likeness of a three dimensional object on a two dimensional plane is one of the things I love about botanical art!