Let's Paint Some Fruit

These paintings are from a few months back and I finally scanned them.  I have improved my color sense since then, but I was really proud of them at the time.  I was playing around with the idea of complementary colored fruit and backgrounds.  The pomegranate is painted in acrylics.  I used an interesting technique on the apple painting where you start with a red ground of watercolor and then erase the highlights using a bristle brush.  Then I went into the shadows with watercolor in order to keep the shadow areas transparent.  After that I put acrylic gloss medium over the painting so I could paint opaquely in the highlighted areas using acrylics.