Veggies

I decided that I would start every day with a pencil and wash drawing of some vegetable(s). The first day, I went to the fridge and took out three out of the four vegetables that are cooked every day (the fourth being onions): ginger, green chillies and tomatoes. Some small eggplants were lying in the bin, so I added one of those as well.

I started with the ginger, and tried to pay very close attention to all of its knobs and ridges. I was pretty happy with it.

Then the chillie. It was harder, because it had fewer features, and I had a difficult time making the colours intense enough. I started with an underglaze of yellow, but after several washes of greens, trying to get the colours right, I lost the yellow, so had to go back and add it again. Then I lost the highlight... sigh.

The tomatoes were even tougher, especially the one on the left - did you know that that was meant to be a tomato? No particular features, and that incredible red/ orange...

Finally the little eggplant, which was more satisfactory.

Drawing and painting these vegetables was so intense and satisfying! I got into that wordless mode where one is very focussed on what one is doing, and was very sorry when I fell out of it again, into the noisy world.

Pineapple

The day that I painted the vegetables just below this, I went to the store to buy some more models to paint. I thought I'd make sure to get some fruits / vegetables with more features, protrusions, patterns, than the tomatoes and green chillies of the morning. So I bought the most fiendishly complicated fruit available, the pineapple, of all things!

Don't ask why it's about to take a nosedive - it's about turning the paper to make it fit; and about being left-handed. It would have looked better if I'd flipped the image vertically, but then the shadow would have been on top.

The pineapple was somewhat skinny and bedraggled, so I painted it that way. I keep having to go back and adding another layer of glaze, because I'm timid about the colours. So then I went overboard on the body of the pineapple, and made it much too orange. I tried to tone that down with a layer of sepia, and the whole thing melted into a blur. And of course, it's more of a symbol of a pineapple than the amazingly intricate thing itself. I enjoyed looking at all its patterns and folds, anyway.

Peppers

I am happy about this drawing -- I corrected the lines as I went, and felt that I had done a good job of capturing the shapes of the vegetables. I decided that I'd better scan it before painting it, in case I screwed it up later. The lines are darker than in reality:

What is it about red? First I had a problem getting the tomatoes to look right; the red pepper was even worse. I like the way the yellow one turned out, though:

In September 2004, I had tried painting a green pepper for the first time. It has a certain tortured, expressionist look to it, for which I feel a certain fondness. I've gotten looser since then, and more in control of colour and the watercolour medium:

Sita's Fruit

This is called Sita's fruit in India - Sita was the wife of Rama, the hero of the epic Ramayana - and custard apple elsewhere.

The fruit is soft, grainy off-white, and wrapped around glossy black seeds. The best way to eat it is to cut of the top and spoon out the fruit. It has a delicate flavour that I like - not everyone does.

Pencil and watercolour wash, with a bit of ink here and there in the shadows.

It's a little teapot

It's supposed to be pewter, but it might be better if I call it china, since it looks nothing like metal. The teapot, that is. I painted it without doing a pencil sketch first, and I did four versions on a large sheet of good Arches paper (that's my preliminary sketch in my notebook underneath). This is the last and best version, with a bit of blue glass from #1 on the lower left, and an unfinished window shutter from an abandoned picture floating in the upper left.

My father bought the tea set when I was a kid - just the small pot, big enough for two cups; and handle-less sugar bowl and creamer. They were very modern at the time, and I've always liked them, even though the pot is too small for more than one person, and I'm too lazy to get it out just for me. But being pewter, they're dull, with that buttery pewter glow; and people think that they're silver and that I'm slovenly and haven't bothered to polish them.

A Journal Page

I started by just putting colours on the page. The next day I started fiddling with an old picture of myself - 1983, sigh - in Photoshop. When I was done I saw that the colours fitted well with my journal page. I fiddled some more with the page - with pen and some more watercolour washes, and glued on the picture.

Then I wrote a few things about that time in my life. I had passed the Foreign Service exam, and was waiting for my security clearance. I knew that I was going to begin a new life, but there was still time to appreciate the old one. It was a happy time for me.

Oh, and there's a not-very-flourishing ficus, from the coffe shop I visited today.

An Experiment

I decided to try several things that were unfamiliar to me all at once. I painted the same picture on an acrylic background, using gouache; watercolours; and watecolour pencil. Not happy with the results, but I've learned a few things. First of all, the colours bead up on the acrylic -- though it happened least with the pencils, because I used a very small amount of water just to dissolve the colours which I had put on dry. Then, I wasn't able to get intensity from the watercolours at all. And the gouache, though it went on darker, somehow turned to mud. I might add that I'm not good at painting flowers in the first place - so that's another part of the experiment. Well, anyway, here they are, my blobby flowers:

Gouache on gold acrylic

Watercolour on gold acrylic

Watercolour pencil on gold acrylic (my acrylic layer was thinner and smoother for this one, which may have helped the pencil to adhere more smoothly)

Loose

You know how sometimes, the harder you work on something, the worse it gets - stiff and lifeless at best? I did that, trying to paint an arrangement of poppies. I did them first in watercolours, then with watercolour pencil. At the end I looked back at my preliminary sketch - just a pencil scribble, over which I had washed a bit of colour - and I liked it best of all:

Moo

I confess that I drew this, not from life, but from a fuzzy old photograph taken by R, which we were going to throw away. It is a Chennai cow, anyway.

My father had several talents of interest to small children: he could wiggle his ears; he had a signet ring - we called it his magic ring - which he could make disappear; but most of all, he was really good at mooing. He was sparing in performing all of these wonders, so that they retained their desirability. But once in awhile we would say, "Make a moo, Daddy!" and he would oblige. It began with a long, deep "MMMMMMMM", and then extended out to "oooooooo", and it was very satisfactory indeed.