Sketch of Two Bananas

This was a very quick sketch I did of two ripening bananas. I have been painting this subject for a couple of months now, and usually do it slowly, attempting to capture minute details with the layering of watercolor washes. I've been noticing that as bananas ripen and the darker brown areas appear on the yellow skin, these circular 'dots' show up but with edges that are soft, bleeding gently into the yellow surrounding areas. For this study my focus was just those round spots and I wanted to experiment with painting them in a way that captured the feel of those soft edges, so I painted them 'wet-into-wet'. I quickly painted the yellow of the background and while this was still wet I added the brown dots. In areas where the yellow was very wet, the dots bled much more than the areas that were drying but still damp. This was a test to assess the level of bleed I wanted for those dots, which I them used for other paintings I did of bananas ripening. Everything beyond the brown dots in this study was loose because I moved on after figuring out what I wanted from the dots. The reverse of this study is an abandoned attempt at the facade of a building in the West Village. 

Size: 9"x12"

2025-06-H

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