Still life with complementary colours

For this exercise I decided to try to rescue the previous exercise, and started by cleaning the jug to try to bring it back to a more realistic silver colour. I found that removing the background colour was very easy with just a rag soaked in water, ready for repainting in a new colour

I wanted a background colour to complement the green of the table and after a few trails I decided on a mix of Cadmium Red, Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Yellow and Titanium White - which gave me a sort of Red Naples Yellow, and introduced some shadows on the table.

Still Life with complementary colours version

Conclusions

This is not a very successful painting - although I used complementary colours the composition looks static.

I like the depiction of the apple and the lemon but didn’t achieve the reflective appearance of the silver jug well - I think I got overwhelmed with the amount of reflection in the jug and I couldn’t manage to simplify it. It was a big challenge and I clearly need more practice. I spent such a long time trying to make this piece work that I was running out of time for my submission, so I didn't do another. I think it was a very worthy exercise however, even though the result was unsuccessful.