Three-object painting

I scrounged around the house looking at stuff and eventually came up with these three objects--an English teapot, a tea strainer my mom gave me, and a jar of marmalade. I drew it with a sepia-colored Tombow (water-soluble) marker, per Brenda's instructions, and then watercolored.

You really do lose the line (and also run the risk of muddiness) with the water-soluble pen, but you can also fudge or complete eliminate lines you don't like with a bit of water, which is nice. When I put in the shadow below the teapot, the top half of the letter "T" went away, and I had to wait until things dried and go back in with the Tombow to redraw it. I didn't put in the "Bonne Maman" until after everything was dry.

I had fun with this, both drawing it and painting it. I used a new brush, though, that is super-flexible--more so than I'm used to, and I think I'll go back to my stiffer brushes. Capturing the feel of tarnished silver for the tea strainer was challenging, and it was surprisingly the addition of a fairly bright yellow that gave it the feel of silver. Something about the light and the reflections.

Here's a photo of the "models" and the picture I made from them. The tea strainer is a little big in scale. And uh-oh, now you can see that it wasn't really marmalade, it was Apricot Preserves! Oh well…