Brassicaceae

I looked up the definition of broccoli, and it said "branched green undeveloped flower heads," as well as "the flowering top of a cabbage." Its latin moniker is Brassica oleracea botrytis, which sounds vaguely like either a special kind of musical instrument or a wrinkle treatment, I'm not sure which.

Anyway. . . keeping up with my regimen of drawing and painting one ingredient between when I arrive home from work and nightfall, tonight's product is BROCCOLI.

At the last minute, I didn't put in any shadow, because I happened to turn the page sideways and realized that if I left it out, the cookbook designer could use it either horizontally (the way I painted it, lying down) or vertically, which actually looks better, I think. So there it is.

Those "undeveloped flower heads" are really hard to duplicate--or at least they are if you have as little patience as I have, combined with a deadline (i.e., the sun is dropping below the roofline of the neighbor's house). I ended up just dotting around various shades of green and hoping for the best.

Shrooms

Getting down to the wire on the cookbook, and I have to quit messing around repainting the same things over and over and get 'er done. I'm going to plan to paint an ingredient to go with each recipe every night when I get home for the next week or so, and I should be done. Tonight: Mushrooms. I bought an array to give a little interest--white, crimini, portabella, shitake--and tossed them out on the table. The shadows and the mushrooms got a little confused with each other, but it was fun to do this essentially monochromatic study. Tomorrow: Broccoli!

Onion-ness

Well, they were still sitting there on the table...so I did them again using a different method. Since the other illustrations I have made for the cookbook are drawn first with pen, I decided to do that here too, but I used a sepia-tone pen instead of black, since the colors of the onions invited that.

Drawing with pen before you paint allows you to define some areas using more than color, which can be an advantage...but it also takes away a little from the subtlety of the movement of color itself. So, for instance, it's much easier to delineate the lines running through and around the onions with a pen, giving more directionality and volume, but it doesn't allow for the fine gradations between areas, since that space is taken UP by the line of the pen. I scanned the drawing first in case I want to use just the drawing for the cookbook instead of the full-color version.

I also got a little carried away with the shadows today, and I'm afraid they are distracting from the subject of the onions, especially that wiggly bleed line between the purple and white onions, which I will have to go back and blur out a bit. I went into this too often, trying to get the colors right, and that was the result, proving it's good to know when to stop while you're ahead.

But it was fun to do this two different ways. Which of them expresses inherent onion-ness?

Following the masters

There is a long and honored tradition in Art World of copying the works of the masters to improve one's own skills. I suppose I could try to hide under the skirt of that tradition here, but...I have to confess that this picture is arrant plagiarism, although it's also intended as admiration.

I needed to paint some onions to go with a recipe in the library cookbook, and was having a hard time thinking of an interesting way to do it. Then I saw Cathy Holtom's post on Down a Dusty Lane, and her idea of painting three different-colored onions together was so wonderful that I decided to try it for myself.

Hers is infinitely more skilled (gorgeous use of color, especially, and they just have that slick and papery feel to them that I found nearly impossible to duplicate), but this was a great exercise. Now maybe I will try some other experiments with it until I find a way to make it more legitimately mine, but thanks, Cathy! I hope you're not offended.

Sketching from life--a tribute

I want to get better at sketching from life, instead of from "still" life or from a photo, so I'm taking my sketchbook along and trying to remember to get it out and use it! I'm not so great at the spontaneous sketch yet--the likenesses are less than satisfactory--but hopeful that practice will make perfect.

My cousin Kirsten and I spent an evening together a few weeks ago, up on the hill behind her house on a little deck from which you can see the entire San Fernando Valley laid out before your eyes. We ate our dinner and chatted, accompanied by her dog, Bucky, who had been ill for a long time, and I made some sketches--one of Kirsten finishing up her sudoku puzzle (which is why it looks like her eyes are closed, because the puzzle is in her lap), and one of Bucky's head, looking down on him from above as he lay at my feet.

It turned out that this was my last chance to see Bucky before he passed. I plan to make a painting for Kirsten from a photograph, but I thought I would put up these two sketches in the meantime and say, Goodbye, Buckster, you were a loving, good and faithful companion to your people, and they (and we) all miss you. You live on in our hearts.

Chicken to paint the chicken

Now we get down to it: I'm working on more illustrations for the library cookbook, and about half a dozen of them include chicken as an ingredient. Being a vegetarian, this is naturally a conflict for me, to have to make the chicken look appealing; plus, you have to decide what to illustrate.

Painting a casserole dish with pieces of chicken submerged in some unnamed sauce doesn't make for a very effective illustration. Nor is a painting of a "naked" raw piece of chicken waiting to be cooked too appealing, even to the non-vegetarians, right? I mean, if you're making vegetable soup, you can cheerfully paint all the veg and everybody says, Oh, don't they look tasty! but raw chicken...no.

So, I opted to paint the live bird. It gives me pangs, though, because in order to make the recipes, this live and lively bird has to be dead and plucked. But...I took on the job, and the job says illustrate the recipes at hand, so...here's the chicken.

The other part of being chicken to paint the chicken is, of course, that I have never painted a bird before, so I didn't know how far to go re: overall shape vs. feathers and detail. I tried to incorporate and move around all the colors, I tried for some definition, I tried for some lost edges, and I went in with a sepia-tone pen to pick up on some details I just couldn't get with the size brush I was using. I don't know if I stopped too soon or not soon enough.

So, overall I'd have to say that my ambivalence about this painting is total! I'm going back to painting onions now...

Twenty-minute Onion

Decided to do a quick one before work today.

The blue in the shadow isn't really warranted--I wanted to introduce another color than all the yellow and brown, but since neither the surface nor the reflective object had any blue...probably a mistake.