I’m stilling working my way through Nino Vecia’s Digital Painting class at Syn Studio.
These still life studies started simple. Apples, bananas, a bowl. Instead of treating them as fixed objects, I used layers to duplicate, flip, and rearrange the fruit to test different compositions. I also pushed saturation adjustments on the fruit and experimented with value shifts in the backgrounds to see how those changes affected the mood.
How saturated should fruit be? Is it perfectly ripe and glowing, or slightly green and muted? I tried both. In some versions, I let the apples punch harder against a cooler bowl. In others, I pulled the environment back and let the fruit sit more naturally.
What surprised me most was how much the background value influenced perceived color intensity. Darker grounds made everything feel richer. Muted bowls gave the fruit more authority. Small adjustments completely changed the hierarchy of the image.
This week felt less like painting fruit and more like learning how to control attention.
I was playful with my subject matter of apples and bananas, but underneath it all this was about design, using value and saturation intentionally instead of accidentally
I’m happy with where these landed.