Painting 1

Ella McDonough "Strawberries"

9x12" Acrylic on Canvas 2024

My first Painting was made based off of a picture of chocolate covered strawberries my friend and I made for my family to enjoy on the fourth of July. I had planned for my first painting to be food, because it would be an easy painting to start the year with, So I looked for a picture of food in my phone to paint and I found the inspiration picture for this painting. I knew I wanted to use this one since it has a fun memory behind it. The inspiration picture originated from a friend and I being bored and hungry, deciding we should make something, we thought about a cake but decided to go down a tastier route and settled on chocolate covered Strawberries. We already had all of the stuff we needed, but we didn't just have red white and blue sprinkles so we spent an hour, separating the three colors from a small container of rainbow colored sprinkles. 

I took a lot longer on this painting than I had planned because I was struggling on the details of it, I wanted it to look as realistic as possible but I wasn't sure how to do so. I started this project by painting the background blue, so that it wasn't too distracting from the focus of the painting. Next I painted the plate that the strawberries are on, before I went straight on with the paint I drew where to paint, so it actually looked like a plate and not just a circle. I started to draw the outline of the strawberries, the leaves, and the details of the strawberries, such as the Sprinkles and white chocolate drip. I made sure to draw a line between the part of the uncovered strawberries and the part which is covered with chocolate. So I painted the chocolate part first by just painting it brown and then moved on to the uncovered part of the strawberries and the leaves. The Next step was to make the white chocolate drizzle part, which was simple. To finish off that part, I added the sprinkles, which was the easiest part out of the whole project. The Strawberries looked weird to me so I decided to trace the chocolate with a darker color to give it a more realistic effect. So I mixed the brown I was originally using and mixed it with some black. 

This piece of artwork doesn't really mean anything, its just a reminder to me of a happy time in my life. The Audience can interpret the painting in anyway they would like, Although theres not any symbolic imagery in the painting, its just a simple painting of chocolate covered strawberries. 

The most difficult part in painting this was trying to make the perfect size for the plate, I kept redoing it because I kept thinking it looked messed up and wanting to perfect it, so it took me a while until I was finally content with the shape of the plate. I also had a hard time with deciding what to do with the leaves, I wanted to make them look more detailed, but I decided to make the art more simple and decided to leave them. I also thought the strawberries looked like clumps of brown, it didn't look like strawberries at all, so I wanted to trace the outlining of each strawberry in a darker color to make it look more real.  The style of this painting is realistic, but I made it seem more simple, so it looks kind of like a cartoon.