painting of Hi-Liter....

This was another half hour painting of an orange highlighter I had lying around in my room. I usually try to break up the form in simple shapes before I start added in the midtones but I feel like when I do that, it looks really flat and wrong until I start putting in the midtones. Sometimes, depending upon how things are hit with light, they don't always have simple shapes to break up the form. Like the duck I painted yesterday in the face, there weren't any real forms I could see to break them up. If I simplified the form into the shapes, there would only be two values I could see distinctly and it would look really weird and flat. I could see some forms in here very quickly to block in the shape but when I did that it still didn't give much of a 3 dimensional view. It took me quite a bit of figuring out what the core shadow color and reflected light is. I still think the color is a little bit browner than what I have. I figured to use blues and purples to mix into a brownish orange to get closer to the color I saw. I also noticed that there was only cool light hitting it so to get some of the highlights I used a light grayish blue.  It seems to work but I wouldn't have thought of doing that before. 

I'm sorry these are really wordy. I guess I'm just trying to understand what I'm painting. I think I might paint the highlighter again because it is a basic shape to paint. Anyway, more to come.