Cranberries

I'm not a huge fan of cranberries--the twice-a-year experience on the Thanksgiving and Christmas buffet is fine with me, and cranberry-flavored things always seem too tart, even when modified by raspberry or lemonade. But I do love how they look--the small nuances in color from pink to coral to, well, cranberry! to dark purple. So on impulse, I bought a small bag of them at the market while shopping for green beans and mushrooms and pearl onions for Thanksgiving, and this morning I threw a handful on the table on my patio so that I would have not just the cranberries but some dramatic shadows to paint. I had some happy accidents with the bleeding into some of the shadows, while others of them got away from me, but for a 30-minute endeavor, start to finish, I was fairly satisfied with my result.

Pencil, watercolor.

A recipe for stuffing

I saw today's prompt from World Watercolor Group ("Stuffing") and thought, Oh, how boring, a 13x9 pan full of breadcrumbs, who wants to draw that? So I decided not to paint today. Then, when I turned off Netflix at 11:00, I suddenly thought, Oooh, but the ingredients!

So, I went on Google images (since I had none of these in the house) and found a picture of an onion and an apple and a sage leaf, and then decided to add in the piece of celery, which made for a lopsided composition but a better recipe for stuffing, and I drew and I painted and I scanned, and here is today's prompt, pre-chop and without the breadcrumbs.

It's not my best painting--but at least I didn't go another day without putting pen and paint to paper.