Egg Cup with Mushrooms

Watercolor on Arches cold pressed paper, 6″x5″ in sketchbook
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I was at Berkeley Giclee on 4th Street in Berkeley on Monday to approve a test print of a painting I sold before the final giclee was made. The photographer/printer, Tony Molatore is a genius and so great to work with. The print is the same size as the original painting and it’s really hard to tell them apart.

While I was on 4th Street I stopped at the Crate and Barrel Outlet and bought some inexpensive goodies to use in still life setups including this little egg cup and periwinkle colored square plate. I’m going to paint this in oils too, but tonight my painting group was here and I wanted to join them with watercolor.

In my many years of painting in watercolor I focused on accurately capturing what I was seeing and on watercolor technique. Now that I’m also painting in oils I can’t just leave the white of the paper as background, or easily crop paintings when they’re done. Overall design and composition become very important so I’ve been trying to relearn all those elements from classes I took so many years ago. I tried to apply a couple of “rules” of good composition here:

1. Never “float” a still life. Make it go off the page on two sides or more (Told to me by Nel Jansen who learned it from another artist.)

2. “Never make any two intervals the same.” In other words, no equal divisions of space or equal quantities of dark/light, warm/cool, color, hard edge/soft edge etc. in a painting (The Simple Secret to Better Painting by Greg Albert — a good basic book on composition).

On the other hand, I’m noticing I have a foreground with nothing in the middle ground or background which seems a little odd and a few hard edges that should have been softened (which I will do later).

And on the other, other hand I had a wonderful time painting and being with my dear painting buddies tonight and seeing the lovely colors and shapes in the things I was painting.