Four Cherries

This is for Rookie Painter July challenge. It's oil on 9x12 canvas board.

Similar to the Three Oranges I painted for this challenge a few months ago, the Four Cherries is also a study of spheres, reflections and interaction of light off each of the objects. I thought the reference picture had pretty good composition. (ref photo) So I kept all the cherries, and all I did was moving background horizon line above the middle of the canvas.

Alizarin (dark red) was the main color for the cherries. It was darken with a combination of ultramarin violet, ultramarin blue, and burnt umber at the darkest places, and lighten with cadmium red, and some lemon yellow as needed. I thought the cherry reflections on the table were interesting to include, so I made them a bit more visible than the reference photo. The cherries were very reflective of light, but I didn't want them to start looking like glass marble balls, so I gave the main cherries more texture, for example, the dimples on the left cherry, and the subtle veins for the middle cherry. The other two cherries I kept relatively texture free except for light reflections.