Red Russian

The Russian impressionists enjoyed their own flavor of illustrating light for us and I LIKE IT!  Load up the brush and paint wet into wet.  The apples are American, the artist is American and the pie I put them into was as American as....well... you know...   Below is also my block-in stage.  I basically have three different ways to start a painting.  This one is a local color block in, then work the background and foreground colors together at the same time, thereby "knitting" the image together.  There had to be an excessive amount of sharp edges since the apples are in our face so to speak.  That had to be balanced, I felt, with plenty of lost edges in the leaves and background.