Pattern with Shoes

We walked into class one day to find our professor had scattered all these shoes on the ground on top of these patterned cloths. I think the girls liked it, but the guys kind of freaked out for a bit. This turned out to be quite challenging. We were supposed to try for some unusual cropping, but since I like a more classical style, I'm not a very aggressive cropper. Plus I really like the nice diagonal created by this set of shoes.

I painted this one much looser than I normally do. The shoes are patent black leather, and a purple cloth type shoe, and our professor is always telling us to throw color into solid objects like this. So I put touches of pink and brown into the shoes. It looks a little strange at first glance, but I kind of like it - it has a very impressionistic feel. I probably overdid it on the first black shoe though.

The fabric was very interesting. It's a fruit pattern. Normally my instinct would be to wait until the white layer dried before painting the pattern, but since we had to do this in class I was forced to work wet on wet. Actually I think that was fortunate, because by keeping the pattern blurry it helps keep it in the background compared to the shoes which are done more sharply. It was tricky though with the color blending into the white paint, so I think if I did it again I would at least paint the white layer more thinly.