Andy’s Banana

My concept for this piece is a tribute to the Velvet Underground and their 1967 album ‘the Velvet Underground & Nico 45th Anniversary’ because I was told to pick a fruit to paint i immediately thought I could do a play on that album cover with Andy Warhol’s famous banana painting. That being said my concept, hence the title, is that Andy Warhol wanted his banana back because the velvet underground stole his snack to photograph.

I made this piece very recently, I spent about a week on it and finished it October 2nd 2023. It’s for my painting class, and I was told to paint a piece of fruit using Watercolors on large water colour paper. So here are my thumbnails, reference photos, practice pages of painting bananas, progress photos, and my finished piece. I actually did a pole on my Instagram to chose between the two reference photos, and it was a very close battle, but despite the results i chose the one with the bite mark because it looked more fruit like and the bite gave it more character.

as fun as it was to make this, I was very nervous about it, I don’t use water colours very often if at all, as I’ve tried a few times before and just could not figure them out. However I think doing as many thumbnails as I did, watching videos, and thinking through my whole process before starting helped me to do a pretty good job on this piece. Because watercolour is about layering, and it takes time to let your layers dry, and I only had a limited amount of time, I had to really zero in on what I would paint and when and I think that laying everything out like that made this piece very sucessful.