How to paint grapes with bloom

How to Create Bloom

Often found on fruits such as grapes, plums and figs, bloom is a whitish coating that the plant produces to protect the fruit as it ripens. In this lesson, I share with you the technique I use to communicate this effect.

What You Will Need

• Paper
• Pencil
• A bunch of grapes
• Putty rubber
• Divider
• Acrylic brushes in size 3
• I use the Da Vinci Nova 5570
• Slightly old and worn out brushes for mixing paint colours
• Jar of water
• Watercolour paints
• I am using Permanent Rose, Lemon Yellow, Cobalt Blue, Winsor Orange, Permanent Magenta, Ultramarine Violet, Rose Dore and Winsor Violet, all from the Winsor & Newton Professional watercolour range in the half-pan size.
• Ceramic palette
• Kitchen towel
• White Gouache paint

Drawing a Small Bunch of Grapes

Step 1

Draw the bunch of grapes. When you're happy, gently rub away your pencil marks so that you're left with a faint outline. Your specimen will most likely present you with a fair few grapes overlapping, which you may want to approach slightly differently.

• As I have shown you in previous lessons, it might be helpful to draw the central axis of each grape first, rather than trying to draw the oval outline freehand.
• Start by drawing the dominant grape that you can see most clearly, and plot its measurements on the page using a divider.
• Next, draw the neighbouring grapes using the same technique, and continue moving around the bunch.
• Due to perspective, some grapes might seem to be a very odd shape once you draw them - but just remember to draw what you see, not what you expect it to look like.

Step 2

Choose your colours, beginning with the palest shade you can see and working through the spectrum to the darkest. You may need to mix a green using yellow and blue, as well as a pink with orange to achieve a peachy colour.

Step 3

Apply your palest colour all over each grape, being careful not to use too much water.

Step 4

Turn your attention to the stalk, and apply a pale wash of green as the base.

Step 5

Going back to your grapes, begin building up the colours you can see working from lightest to darkest. As in our previous lessons together, think about your highlight zones and areas of shadow.

Step 6

Move between different grapes and the stalk as you wait for areas to dry, slowly building up the layers of colour to create the illusion of form.

Step 7

Once you're completely happy with the colours in your painting and it's almost finished, you're ready to add the bloom. The white gouache paint shows up particularly well against dark areas, so go over your painting and consider if there's any areas you can increase the darkness a little.

Step 8

Dispense the white gouache paint onto your ceramic palette, and dip your brush into it; we will be using it as a sort of glaze, so you only need a very tiny amount on your brush.

Step 9

Add a light covering of the paint to the areas of your grape where you can see the bloom - it's often patchy and random, so try to represent this on your painting for a realistic effect.

Step 10

When you are finished adding the white gouache, go back in very delicately with some darker paint to edge the zones of bloom and really make it stand out.