One can easily buy a handful of flowers or a basket of fresh fruit at the Floating Market anytime in the morning. Thai people usually use flowers as an offering to the Buddhist monks or for their spirit houses at home. It's common to find a huge variety of fresh fruit available in the Floating Market, a fact known to the many market visitors.

Thailand has always been an agricultural country and today it is one of the largest exporters of agricultural produce in the world! The price of fruit is reasonable and the freshness can't be beat.

This painting gives a general idea of the canal filled with vendors selling their flowers and fruit. The shape of this painting is arranged in a diagonal manner. An oriental paper umbrella placed in the lowest corner emphasizes the foreground. I used burnt sienna for the umbrella as well as for the many boats.

The water in the canal was done as a quick wash with cerulean blue for the first layer. For the second layer I added a bit of tinted Payne's gray around the boats. I left little bits of white paper showing through around the figures, bamboo poles and boats to indicate sparkles of sunlight.

On the boat nearest the umbrella flowers are wrapped in rolls of banana leaves. I used a few touches of ruby red for the flowers and tinted viridian green for the banana leaves. The boat in the back right was loaded full of watermelons, one of them cut in half to show the juicy redness of the fruit. I used a mixture of tinted yellow ochre and cerulean blue for the watermelon, and a little ruby red for the sliced one.

Overall the painting is in a good arrangement. Not only does the direction of the umbrella lead the eye upward into the painting, the similarity of colors and tones indicated the brightness of that sunny day.