Lemon Trio

I wanted to explore painting fabric, so I laid these three lemons on a white tea towel.  The background is the dark gray of my light box.

Claire Christinel said that in a workshop she learned that she should look at values not just relative to the object, but also relative to the values in the rest of the composition.  (You can click on her name to see her blog.)  

I was thinking about that today as I was painting.  The edges of the lemons looked very dark against the white cloth.   I also thought some of the shadows of the cloth looked almost as dark as the background.

I've painted lots of lemons (there are usually always some in the refrigerator).  When I compare this painting to the others, I realized that I painted all the lemons differently, with different colors of shadows and highlights.  They all look like lemons, though.   The values are more important than the colors.  People say that all the time, but when I lined up my lemon paintings I could really see it.