Painting 101:

How to draw and paint texture

by Tissa Hewavitarane

The ability to portray texture effectively is an important artistic skill, yet many artists have difficulty in depicting it realistically without making their painting and drawings look over-worked. Different artists try to tackle the problem with regard to a wide variety of subject matter. The bloom on a peach the richness of a satin garment, animals fur, the roughness of a bark plant, leaves and flowers to name a few. It will be of value to all artists and beginners who wish to add that touch of realism to the textures portrayed in their work. You will learn how to achieve the required effects using pen or pencil, charcoal, pastel, oil or acrylic paint, water colour or gouache.

A painting showing the ripe strawberries and lightly overlaid washes on top of the oranges on a wet in wet technique.

You will gain knowledge how to exploit a particular medium to best advantage, as well as how and when you might consider using a mixture of media or a special technique to make the textures in your work more realistic.

Vegetables and fruits

When you are choosing a still life subject try to fetch objects to paint that really excite you and produce a challenge terms of technique. Fine paintings can be made from very simple subjects such as one or two apples, selection of fruits or vegetables. Fruits vegetables and other edibles have always been among the most popular painting subject. Not only do they display a marvellous range of textures and colours, they also stimulate in providing ideas to convey an interesting of textural contrasts.

Media and methods

Although many of the textures of fruit, and vegetables and food can be rendered equally effectively in number of media, it is worthwhile to consider their relative strengths and weaknesses by trying out several different ones. You will find that some are well suited to represent a particular texture while others will have to be half as successful.

Drawing fruit and vegetables can be an excellent introduction to the idea of representing texture. The wide range of different surfaces, colours and shapes will challenge your skills on many different levels, particular testing your ability to adapt your drawing style to suit the subject. The pencil is one of the most versatile of all drawing style the most versatile of all drawing implements, offering an almost infinite range of marks and effects which will suit most approaches and styles. Take care, however not to grip the pencil as though you were going to write with it as this will always lead to stiff and rather formal drawing. If you want to try more suggestive possibilities of the pencil don't sharpen it all the time - experiment with a worn rounded soft leaded pencil. For those who find it difficult to draw fruit and culinary subjects in monochrome coloured pencils can be an exciting alternative. To get the most desired effect be sure to use a paper with a slight grain so that you can build up the drawing. If the paper is hard and smooth, the colours will lack depth and the result will look rather thin.

Use of watercolour

There are certain fruit and vegetables that seem to lend themselves well to the delicate, translucent effects of watercolour. For example, gentle transparent washes can beautifully convey the quality of inner light seen in thin-skinned fruit such as grapes or plums. It also seems the perfect medium for rendering the delicate membrane of the skin that covers a vegetable such as onion or garlic. Shiny fruit and vegetables with clear highlights are also suitable subjects, but because watercolour is such a fluid medium it is less easy to make it describe rougher textures. A disadvantage with watercolour is that it is difficult to make major corrections, so you do have to plan from the outset, making preliminary drawings and paying more attention to the placing of highlights, which are the clues to the texture of the fruit. Observe the painting showing the moist heaviness of ripe strawberries and gentle highlights of the oranges captured by making wet-in-wet so that there are no hard edges. Notice the lightly overlaid washes on the top of the oranges, suggesting their slightly pitted texture and the careful reserving of the pale yellow highlights. The paint has been controlled with great skill.

Use of pastel

Pastel is a wonderfully sympathetic medium for drawing soft skinned fruits such as peaches or apricots. The vivid colours and opaque, matt surface perfectly recreate those of the subject. The dry crumbly nature of pastels also make them highly suited for rendering foods which have a similar texture, such as cakes, bread and biscuits. One thing to remember about pastel, however is that the effects you achieve depend very much on how you use them. Blending colours together with the finger, a piece of cotton wool, or very tight roll of paper with a point at one end will produce a soft effect with colours and tones merging together. Pastel can be used to convey detailed and complex textures and colouring.

Use of oil paint

Oil paints is such a versatile medium with the possibility of rendering so many different textures in such a variety of ways, that it is almost impossible to choose any one technique over another as particularly suitable for culinary subjects. One of the great beauties of oil paint is that, because it takes a long time to dry, you can carry out a good deal of blending and colour mixing on the surface of the canvas or board.

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