Paintings, Passions, and Presents...

Delicious Apples, watercolor, 7" x 14"

This is an older painting that took a while to come together. I'm posting it to share how I developed it. When I painted this, I was a member of a group that worked from a new still-life every week and I often painted an aerial view of the setups. I used a Polaroid camera so I could record the setup for later reference and also start work from it immediately. The images were pretty crummy, but I liked that because it forced me to improvise. I'd cut a rudimentary mask for the image and mark it with grid marks to aid in transferring a drawing to my watercolor paper. Here's the working image, just a little over 2 inches wide in real life.

In this case, I wasn't thrilled with the cutting board nor with the straight piece of striped fabric, so I concentrated on painting the pitcher and vegetables. I worked on them on and off for months, all the while wondering what I could do with the background. Then one day when the painting was sitting on an easel in another workshop, the instructor took one look at it, pulled up a chair underneath the easel, sat down facing us and mimed juggling the fruits and veggies that appeared above his head. His impulsive act triggered my idea to create an ambiguous background -- so the objects might seem to be on a table or perhaps tumbling through the air.

I love the visual excitement of striped fabrics, so I pulled a piece out of my stash, arranged it with the still-life in mind, and took a Polaroid shot from approximately the same distance as I had the original still-life. Then I carefully sketched it in behind the completed objects on my painting and began the task of making it appear "real." Along the way, I added several items to the still-life as needed for the composition. The end result was exactly what I had hoped for.

Blog Award:


I am honored to receive this blog award for the second time in a couple of weeks, this time bestowed by Deb Ward. Deb is part of the group centered around Cincinnati, and from what I can tell, that seems to be an area brimming with talented people who are all passionate about painting!! In addition to working in watercolor and acrylic, Deb is one of the few people I know of who works in casein, and she also teaches classes in the Cincinnati area. Please check out her blog.

And now I really have to follow up with passing this award along!! I've chosen several artists I already know, and a few that I've been following silently. So in no particular order, I am tagging: Connie Williams, Jeanette Jobson, Susan Beauchemin, Andy Smith, Steven Walker, Fábio Cembranelli, and Terry Rafferty. Visits to their blogs will definitely be worth your time.

And finally:
I promised that I would announce the winner of the first bloggiversary painting this weekend. At my husband's suggestion, I set up a "raffle" based on the number of comments I received from everyone in the past year and he drew a ticket from the bowl. Rhonda Carpenter -- I need your mailing address!!!