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.

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.

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: