hot dog buns 16x20

Here is another little cyber demo. My students often ask me how to depict transparent things like glass or plastic. The following is one way of approaching these subjects.

There are a couple of things to remember when painting transparent objects. The first is that, obviously, you can see through them so you will be painting what is behind the object but with some distortion. The other is that most transparent things also have some reflective qualities. Think about water, glass and plastics, so you will be painting their reflective surfaces as well.

I start by drawing the item with a mixture of ultramarine blue and transparent red oxide.

Once the basic drawing is done I start blocking in values with the same two colors.

On this painting I decided I wanted to use more local colors on my value block-in so I used some red, yellow and blue in the Rainbow labeling.

Once everything is blocked in and dry I start with the second layer. The buns seemed like the obvious place to begin. When doing plastic like this I like to mix up a bunch of my background in color strings going from dark to light. This is what is going to be used for the clear parts of the plastic. At this point it's just a matter of observing the reflections and shadows as closely as possible.

The highlights are usually among the last things that get painted. It's important to note that they are typically not pure white. I don't really have a formula for what color they are. I usually have to try a couple of things before I get something that starts to look right.