I worked on this painting this past week and unfortunately overworked it.  It's entirely too dark, boring and not worth any more paint or my precious time. 

I started last week by sketching a value study with burnt sienna.  That went pretty well. (See the last post for that painting.)

This week I added color, starting with the shadow family, as shown below.

I continued that day with adding the light spots of color on each object, as shown below.  (I hadn't painted the grapes when the photo was taken.) 

Lastly that day, I painted the background and shelf colors. 

I wish I had stopped right there and focused just a few things such as a better background, the bottom of the pot, and the pear.  Instead, the next day I darkened the background because I was using the Chardin painting as a reference. Unfortunately, doing this made all the other objects too 'light', so I darkened them as well.  What I ended up with was a dark and quite boring painting, in my opinion.  

Lessons learned in this painting:

1. I am no Chardin, that's for sure!  His works are stunning. 

2. Painting from another painting is akin to kissing your cousin; it's a kiss, but without the passion. 

Life if too short to live without passion.  I look forward to setting up and painting the next still life with joie de vivre.