Still life: tomato transparencies

Here is a cool tomato, wearing my favorite shades. Today's still life theme was transparency, using a tomato with various forms of transparent materials. The lenses of the shades are a charcoal grey which created darker tints on the tomato skin, and dulled the intensity of surface reflections. The lenses reflected overhead lights. A reflection along the bottom of the tomato ended up looking like a smile. 

Tomato shades, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, December 2025 

Here is the tomato as seen through a zip lock bag, the bag is being held up by a framing rack but I omitted it from the painting so the bag seems to be standing up by itself. To show the transparency effect, I placed my 2 inch hog's hair brush partly behind the plastic so it goes from being sharp and high contrast to blurry and low contrast behind the plastic. The plastic was wrinkled and crinkled which created a layer of light and shadow, while blurring the overall form of the tomato. 

Tomato seen through zip lock bag, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, December 2025 

Finally the most challenging of all, is the tomato as seen though a beer mug. Its one of those glass beer mugs with the oval depressions, this one has a Concordia University logo badge on the front. The University really wants us to help with student recruitment, so what better way to say 'Bachelor's Degree' than a beer mug reflecting a tomato? In fact, the glass bent light sufficiently so as to create a large image of the tomato on the concave, with smaller versions of the same tomato on the convex oval sections. Red and green light intermixed on the front and side angles, creating a neat holiday colour scheme. 

Tomato seen though beer mug, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, December 2025