Digital Painting Induction Part 2 - Colour Apples

This is the colour follow up to the greyscale digital painting exercise. I chose the same image of the apples to work from in order to improve upon the issues in the first exercise, and I feel as though it made a quantum leap forwards. 

I'm much happier with the form of the apples, the composition, the contrasting tones - essentially every aspect has improved. Again I worked from right to left, apple by apple, and again I think my technique has improved each time, although the third and largest apple is maybe a tad glossier than I wanted - the initial two apples seem to have more of a sense of realism to them.

Much as I like using the clipping mask, I could potentially do with taking greater care with the silhouettes I create as a base. They are far more accurate than in my greyscale attempt, but some of the roundness of the apples has been lost due to a lack of attention to the smoothness of the silhouette's outlines. I could of course have smoothed it out with other tools/methods, but I wanted to leave it unmodified as a record of an aspect I can improve on.

They're quite definitely apples this time. No more amorphous grey blobs.