wonky bowl and wonky plate

 I've had spare time today and yesterday and I had great hopes at really getting stuck in and coming up with something good. It's great not having to take everything out/put it all away again, to be able to take a couple of hours and hack away at this. The results are disapointing though.

My little bowl of tomatoes is dead wonky, and dull, and lifeless.

My plate of egg, freshly laid this morning btw, is also wobbly, and grubby and scrubby, and not at all fresh and quick. Erg, the more I look at it, the more that egg white looks like a horrid glob of mucus! I suppose I thought improvement might happen easily, but now I think I'm going backwards. All a bit dispiriting, well, unless of course the world is crying out for a good mucus painter.

Aubergines

Aubergines are another absolute fave food, and oily, garlicky unctuous dishes such as imam bayildi or tumbet would definitely be on my top ten dishes for when you are stranded on a desert island with fab ingredients and a excellent cooker, some great knives.....

I have no idea why I put these on a pink background. The one on the right is okayish, the other is too bitty, but then if I look again, the one on the right is too stripey and the other one looks better. Okay, they are both flawed. If I concentrate on dark/light, I lose the colour, if I look at the colour, I lose the shape, it's bloody tricky, and I'm only attempting to do someting simple, not a great big complicated affair. I shall go off and introduce these two to an obscene amount of oil and garlic now.

global chilli

I'm aware that I am avoiding items that have a definite shape and playing safe. So here we go, a knife. I figure it is flatter and therefore easier than cups/jugs/jars etc.

Well, it' not fab, but it's not disastrous I don't think. I have a problem with shadows, I've no idea what there are supposed to be made up of . Paul gave me some good advice re the colour of the item being in the shadow, but I obviously haven't taken it in. The chilli looks like a green slug, but, in my defense, maybe it looks really really like a great green slug and I've captured it perfectly! Ahem.

you are what you eat.

Today I stayed with the chilli/lime theme and did my profile pic. There was no way I was going to be able to do an actual self portrait, so hell, might as well be silly.

ingredients

Two of my current favourite ingredients. Well, even though that is true, I also cheated a bit; ginger should have been in here but I didn't figure it would look good. Also, there are other times when potatoes or something equally dull looking are my fave ingredient, and I probably won't paint them. I should look out for nice aubergines though.

I stoopidly put these on a plate, and then immediately lost the shape of the thing. I don't mind my lime actually, and the bottom chilli has it's moments. This was done in extreme haste as I was just back from a horrid two hour dentist session and was getting sorer and sorer as the numbness wore off.

curry for dinner

I popped over to the local veg shop and came back with a huge leafy bunch of coriander, a juicy hand of ginger, shiny green limes and long deep red chillies- I love that, a big bag of ZING -  I'm more and more interested in cooking limey/zesty/fiery/fresh food these days.

The chillies were crying out to be painted, and I'm not utterly disapointed with the result. I like parts of this, and am cross about other parts.  It's amazing how just one little brush stroke can either make things right, or make bits fail. I suppose that's part of the challenge. I'm still loving trying though.

spring and sun and daffs

Glorious sunny spring day, did hours of gardening. The few daffodils I have looked beautiful in half sun, half shade, so I murdered two and brought them inside.

I knew once I started attempting things that need to be drawn properly that things would go very wrong, et voila! The bottle and perspective, and curves and straight lines, and all that are wrong, but... I kinda like this. I'll call  it naive. It took me absolutly ages to try and get blues sorted a bit. An environmental crimes worth of paper plates was used up in the effort.