1. Tone the canvas and draw
Brush a thin wash of burnt sienna over the whole canvas, thin like tea, and let it dry for 15 to 30 minutes. A warm ground takes away the glare of white canvas, makes light and dark easier to judge, and any bits that show through later warm the painting.
When it’s dry, draw the big shapes with a small round brush and burnt umber thinned with water. Draw the edge between light and shadow on each object too. Deciding it now saves guessing later.
2. Darks first
Paint the background, the cast shadows and the shadow side of each object. Leave the lit sides as the toned ground for now. With the darks in, you can already see where the light comes from, and the objects look solid early.
3. Block in local colors
Give every object its own color in two flat values, one for the light and one for the shadow. Keep the split clear and don’t blend yet. Detail only helps once the painting reads correctly as flat shapes.
4 and 5. Turn the forms
Now make the round things look round. Mix a half-tone between the light and shadow colors and lay it along the edge where they meet. Without a half-tone, a form looks cut in two. A white jug is the clearest place to learn this, because its light, half-tone and shadow are easy to see. Then do the same on each lemon.
6. Background and cloth
Go back over the background and the cloth with broken strokes that let a little of the layer below show through. Flat, even paint behind the objects tends to read as a wall, while broken color reads as space behind them.
7. Highlights and dark accents last
Put the lightest lights and the darkest accents on at the end, thick and opaque, so they stay clean and crisp. A highlight painted early gets dragged into everything around it.
What you need
- A 30 × 40 cm (12 × 16 in) canvas
- Titanium white, ultramarine blue, burnt umber, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, cadmium yellow medium and cadmium red medium
- A 1-inch flat, a couple of filberts, and small rounds for drawing and details
- A pencil, a rag, and water
Sources and further reading
Follow the lesson in PaintCue
PaintCue comes with two free lessons, the white jug and lemons and a mountain lake, with a picture of the canvas at every stage, the paints to use, and why each stage comes when it does. They work offline, in English and Simplified Chinese.
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See how PaintCue worksQuestions
Why paint the darks first?
The darks show where the light falls. Once the shadows and the background are in, you can judge every lighter color against them, and the objects look solid before you’ve painted any detail.
How long should I wait between stages?
With acrylic, until the layer is dry to the touch, which for thin layers is usually minutes rather than hours. Thin washes like the toned ground can take 15 to 30 minutes. Painting into a half-dry layer drags the paint and muddies the colors.