Two Red Pears

This is for Rookie Painter, Feb 2012 challenge, Two Red Pears. It's oil on 10x10 canvas panel.

Despite of the crazy week and a half where I traveled to two different countries with one kid on a swim meet and another on a field trip, I had to do this challenge (ref). I like the simple layout and high contrast. I did this in about 3 hours of painting time while blasting Queen (I usually listen something much quieter). I prepared the canvas last night by painting the whole thing black with acrylic paint. Again, I could have tweaked and refined this even more, but I had to leave it as is since the kids came home from school and the deadline is today.

My relatively simple palette included mainly cadmium yellow, cadmium orange, burnt sienna, alizarin, burnt umber, ultramarine blue, ultramarine violet, white, yellow orchre.