Still Life with Red Pear

I walked into Safeway and saw this pear, and my jaw just dropped. The hue was so intense, it just called out to be painted. So I heeded the call and built a still life around it

(I have to state that this is a truly awful photo of this painting!)

In this still life, I tried a few new things:

It's the first time I attempted stem-with-leaves. I used the palette knife on its edge, which David Leffel showed me how to do. (I've been dying to try it out since then!) I'm going to try this in some upcoming still lifes. It's tricky to get the stem thin enough, and I want to work on that so I can add this to my painting repertoire. A stem with some kind of flora always seems to add a nice flourish.

• The lighter side of the background, filled in with a tint of a somewhat complementary colour, meant to define the colour of "air" in the painting. I think it could get a bit lighter. In fact, the entire painting needs more light.
  
• The "halo" of colour around the pear (not very visible in this photo). This is also something that David Leffel does, and I've been meaning to try it. The idea is that the light it so intense that it saturates the air around it, even bleeding into the background.

Some things that I would have liked to do better:

• Location location location! When I started this still life, all of the objects were slightly bigger, and I decided they should be smaller, but SOMEHOW when I reduced them in size, everything got stuck kinda smack-dab in the centre of the painting, which annoys me, but by the time I was conscious of it, it was way too late to fix.


• I think the pear is OK as-is, but for some reason, it took me a bunch of times painting and re-painting to get it into decent shape. It's not a tricky subject, I just wasn't happy with how it looked until I got it to this point.