Health potion

 For the health potion I wanted it to be a classic glass jar that has a colourful liquid, this gave me a chance to practice painting glass which I'm not used to . i started by sketching out two designs , thr first design was a completely rounded jar that looks more scientific and this is something i did like about this design in particular , i also liked the angle at which I had the bottle at as I think it was more interesting than having it upright and flat looking. The second design was much chunkier with a squared jar and corked top, this shape would give me more of a challenge to paint which may be interesting and i did like the idea of a slightly bigger jar but it doesn't have as much of a potion feel to it . Despite this I liked the second design best and decided to take it forward.

For this piece I skipped the tonal painting as I wanted to test my skills using colour. So I started by throwing down some general areas of light and dark to describe the shape and then went back into this untill it was as detailed as I wanted it to be. I also played around with the colour to experiment .

This simple start also allowed me to focus on solely the bottle and not have to think about smaller details yet such as a label which I added later on.

I think my main improvement i would suggest for this piece is to better define the edges at the top in the back as i think having that definition would frame the object better overall and further the structure of the piece.

I do like the way I painted the two top edges closest to the viewer as i used a contrast of dark and light colours next to each other  and this worked really nicely in the end and it was very important to get these two edges right as they are in the centre of the piece and is where my eye was always drawn to so I wanted to make sure it looked properly rendered.

Overall I am happy with this piece as I think i managed to get the right glass effect which I was worried about messing up, I think they key to this was the  way I used my shadows and highlights to so how the surface was effected by light and also it framed the inside space of the jar which is often  a but smaller than the outside  shape due to the thickness of the glass. Improvements  I would have made would be the defining the back edge at the top of the bottle as I think it’d give the overall shape more structure, also I would try and make the white highlights blend more by using the bright pink colour seen elsewhere  in the piece.

Revision

Based on feedback I added stronger highlights to the bottle.