Day 26

Oh, boy, sometimes things are just irredeemable. I like the way peppers look with the smooth, almost car-like finish and seductively curved surfaces, but I think that should probably have cued me in to NOT PAINT ONE. Smooth, shiny, curvy surfaces are not hard to paint, precisely, but they require real attention to detail, something that's really tough to do in a half-hour study. So....yes, it's an attempt at a pepper. Bleah.

Day 25

White on white. A color scheme first proposed by James McNeill Whistler, but somehow I don't suppose he ever ate a clove of garlic in his life. He might have, though, on his continental travels. Personally, I love garlic, although I don't go so far in poeticizing it as the "stinking rose" folks. I just eat it. Lots of it. It's getting harder and harder to find the American variety around here, though, as it's being forced out by the sharper Chinese variety in the supermarkets. I love Chinese garlic in Asian recipes like Laab and so on, but it doesn't roast as sweetly as the California bulbs, to my taste. Still, they're all beautiful to paint and the papery coats are just gorgeous. In this one, I got really into laying the white on thickly to capture the soft highlights of the bulb. OK, now I've made myself hungry.....

Day 24

Well, it's a bit of a wrench.

Day 23

To quote the great philosopher Don Hertzfeldt, "I...am a banana!" I love the color yellow, primarily because it seems to cheer me up, speaking as it does of things I like: Spring, Fall, and tropical fruit. Yellow is also a pain in the butt to shade, since you really have to keep a close eye on the color temperature of the shading as you go. Too warm, and it looks "glowy", too cool and it gets sort of dead and moldy looking. In these pieces recently, I've been using up a tube of Hansa Yellow Light as my base yellow color. It's not my favorite yellow, since its tinting strength is relatively weak, but it sure makes you think when painting, which is always a good thing when doing exercises like this.

Day 22

The onions again. I'm beginning to feel that I'm winning.

Day 21

A painting of a poppy from last Summer. I miss Summer and I love poppies, so it was just sheer self-indulgence to paint this. It's also a lot of fun to use knife techniques to suggest various textures. I still feel like it's cheating, but it does get effective results.

Day 20

Mangoes are wonderful. Besides being vividly colored and beautifully shaped, they make me think of the tropics--much appreciated in Winter. I'm finding that I'm turning into more of a painter than a draw-er. My previous dailies seem to be more like colored drawings to me than the current bunch. I'm not doing anything consciously different, but I think that my spatial perception has shifted oddly toward a more "solid" direction.

I've always held Velasquez's painting in very high regard, particularly his study/portrait of Juan de Pareja. If you look closely (and I have) there are no lines in the piece--it's all planes and splotches of color (to use the scientific terminology). I'd love it if some of that mojo rubbed off on me.