VIDEO TUTORIAL: Painting a Tomato (Patreon)

In this beginner to intermediate tutorial I will show you how you can paint realistic looking tomatoes. I think painting food is a great exercise, also when your end goal is to paint portraits. There are so many things to learn and study when painting food like this. You're working on edges, color, textures, lighting, etc. I hope you'll enjoy painting these tomatoes as much as I did 😊

I've added a short breakdown of all the steps. I have added the reference image,  color palette and working file in case you want to take a closer look. 

Have fun painting tomatoes!

Canvas size: 3000 x 4000

The Steps

0:00 - 8:18 : The first step in the process is creating a sketch, we'll do this by using the Flotastic Sketcher. Of course you can use any sketching brush you like.

8:18 - 16:00 : The next step is to drop all the base colors on different layers, that way we can easily add textures and lighting to the tomatoes without going over the other tomato or stems. We'll work nice and organized! I used the Smooth Lines and Tapered Lines brushes for this step

16:00 - 27:00 : In this step we'll work on the lighting of the tomatoes. We'll set the layers to alpha lock so we won't be painting outside of the shapes. Using the Make it Darker brush, you can work on adding shadows to the tomatoes. You can do the same thing for the global highlights, using the Make it Lighter brush. I also like adding some vibrant color to the tomato by using the Overlay brush. We won't be working on bright highlights during this step yet.

27:00 - 34:00 : Using the Make it Lighter brush and a lighter color, a light blue for instance, you can start working on the brightest highlights on the tomatoes. The tomatoes are really starting to take shape after this step!

34:00 - 53:00 : Once you got that basic lighting down, you can start refining your tomatoes. I used the Basic Flo brush for instance, to add the little seeds. The Darken Line 2 and the Lighten Line 2 brushes are great for refining highlights. For example to add the little light at the bottom of the left tomato. Little touches like that will add to the realism. The Wet Subtle Gloss brush from the Makeup Set is also great for adding wet highlights to that slice on the right.

53:00 - 1:05:00 : To make the water droplets, we'll start out by making basic droplet shapes on a separate layer. You can use a dark color for this. Once you have added all the droplets, you can set the layer to multiply and lower the opacity. We'll use the selection option to make a selection of the layer and then create a new layer and fill all the droplets with a light color. We'll set this new layer to screen. We'll add a layer mask to this new layer and fill it with black, then you can pick white and paint over the droplets with the Basic Flo brush. This way you can lighten the edges of the droplets.

On a layer underneath the droplets, we'll then add a little shadow. The droplets are already taking shape! Finally, one a new layer on top of the other droplet layers, you can add brighter highlights to really add that spark to the droplets. I'm using the Basic Flo brush for this step.

1:06:00 - 1:10:00 : Finally we'll add a reflection on the surface the tomatoes are lying on. We'll group all the layers we have created (excluding the background layer) and duplicate this group. Merge these layers and then flip this new layer vertically. Drag it down and distort it a bit to make a mirrored version of the tomatoes. Lower the opacity of this layer and then add a mask. Fill this mask with black, then grab the Soft Brush set to white, to paint a part of the reflection back in.

The reference photo is a Shutterstock photo, feel free to use it for practice purposes (you just can't use it for commercial purposes like selling prints ;))

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