Practice and Pears

I am participating in a 4" x 6" swap with the WatercolourPencilBuddies Yahoo! group for the month of April and have been playing with ideas. One of them was to use dark paper and my Albrecht Durer watercolor pencils to sketch a couple of tulip tree blossoms, but now I am leaning toward pears, or maybe tulips, or maybe a robin..... I believe the theme is Spring and as you can see, I am having a really hard time narrowing down my choices.


Here is a little, quick attempt at tulip tree blossoms that I put together this morning. This is a 4 x 5 piece of dark card stock.

And here is the same piece with just a bit of blending with a tissue.

I'm not sure which one I like better, but I am pretty pleased with this 15 minute try.

I am still enamored with pears since taking the Pear-ology class with Martha Lever, and as a matter of fact I have a still life class with the Jackson Civic Art Association on Wednesday. We are encouraged to bring some pieces to arrange with a clip-on lamp for illumination and shadows. I've been playing with the arrangement of some pears I purchased yesterday.

I love how the texture shows up in this one.

I used a watercolor filter in Photoshop on this one.

I used the posterize adjustment layer in Photoshop on this one.

I used a flash on this one.

I've already done my treadmill workout this morning but haven't eaten yet. The entire time I was arranging these pears, my stomach was growling like crazy. I am thinking I might be wise to go to Michael's later today and get some artificial fruit to use in my still life class and eat these. Yum!

I am hoping to find lots of time to play in my art room today and am wishing you that same opportunity.

xoxo