After being immersed in a failed oil painting portrait and a major home construction project it was wonderful to return to sketching despite feeling rusty. The funny flat peaches in the drawing above are called “Donut” peaches. They’re just as yummy as the round ones and way better for you than donuts. Below are more banana and peaches sketches.
In the foreshortened banana sketch above I was experimenting with the “Flatting” brush in Procreate.
While I was away from my blog, WordPress made some nice changes that are making it easier to post so I’m trying to get caught up with a few months of sketches and paintings. Today a couple of fruit bowls sketched in Procreate on the iPad.
Continuing the series of morning sketches, mostly done of random stuff on the breakfast table.
I’m usually skeptical of anything that says “As Seen on TV” on the label, but I heard someone raving about how “Debbie Meyer Green Bags” keep fruit fresh longer and decided to give them a try. They actually do work. I used them during the summer with tomatoes from my garden and very few of them went rotten. They seemed to last for weeks without putting them in the refrigerator. I used the bags successfully with bananas and peaches too.
They supposedly can be reused 8 to 10 times but I’ve found that each time you reuse the bags they seem to have less potency. The package says they are “made with a “a natural mineral ‘Oya’ that absorbs and removes the ethylene gases that cause normal deterioration.” Oya is made from zeolite, a kind of clay found in Japanese caves.
You do have to keep the contents of the bags dry and I found putting them in the refrigerator means they get moisture inside and you have to keep wiping the inside of the bag. I hope I don’t find out later
About the watercolor:
I wanted to use masking fluid to preserve the white highlights and shiny spots on the bag but when I opened my bottle of masking fluid I found it had turned into a solid lump of white rubber. So I tried using a white colored pencil as a resist on the white areas, but when I painted over it it didn’t repel the paint. I could have drawn the whole thing out really, really carefully and saved the white areas by painting around them, but I didn’t have the time tonight.
So I just painted, planning to use my white gel pen for the highlights but discovered it too had dried up. In the end I made the highlights with liquid Golden acrylic, drawing straight from the little squirt bottle of paint, blobs and all.
P.S. WordPress rolled out it’s new version today with a beautiful, pwerful and simple new user interface that makes blogging a joy! Yay WordPress!
Watercolor on Arches Cold-Pressed paper in 5.5 x 7.5 sketchbook
Larger
After working half the day I decided to finally vacuum my house since I was feeling sleepy and not particular creative and the house and studio sorely needed cleaning. I’ve been contentedly choosing painting over housecleaning for too long, and the cat hair was piling up. So I dusted, vacuumed, washed the throw rugs, brushed the kitties with a great new cat and dog brush, the FURminator, that thoroughly removes the undercoat and ends shedding for weeks (the pictures on their website don’t lie–it’s amazing how much fur comes off the first time).
After dinner I was still sleepy but knew I’d be sad if I just turned on the TV and had no fun in the studio at all today. So I grabbed the only produce left in the kitchen (I’ve also been putting off the grocery shopping) and painted these bananas.
While I painted I was listening to a fascinating book, Crashing Through, about a man who was blinded at the age of 3, became a downhill speed skier, an entrepeneur, married, had kids, and a great life. Then he was given the historical opportunity to try an experimental surgery and become one of only 20 people in the history of the world who, after a lifetime of total blindness, had his sight restored, via a stem cell and corneal transplant. The book provides really interesting information about vision and how we make sense of what we see, from distance perception, to 3-dimensionality, to recognizing faces and expressions. It turns out it actually has to do with parts of the brain rather than the eyes and is learned in infancy.
A lot of that information is useful for painting. When the author explains how the brain uses visual clues to judge distance, these are the same things artists use to create the illusion of depth and distance in paintings. These include objects getting smaller the further away they are, closeness to the horizon (the further away or taller something is, the closer to the horizon it is), aerial perspective (the effect of moisture and particles in the air between the distant object and the viewer that causes distant objects to appear grayer, cooler, paler than closer objects), linear perspective, and occlusion (one thing in front of another).
Jana Bouc, Artist 
