Current Project

I am a little obsessed with pears lately.  This is my most recent work in progress, cleaned up for the photo, since the entire work area is generally adrift in piles of little paper snippets and torn bits.  I decided to use a canvas board support instead of  heavy watercolor paper this time, and I'm using soft gel medium as my glue.  It works well, although last night I spent most of the evening after I cleaned up picking little scabs of gel medium off my hands.  This image has quite a large area around the edges that will never show, since it will be covered with a mat, but I wanted paper right to the edge of the board.  This time I am using a combination of found paper colors and prepared papers.  There are old Post magazine pages, old sheet music, old cheese factory ledger pages, all painted with thinned down acrylic paint.  I also painted to canvas board with a combination of blue and violet, thinking I'd let little bits of the under-painting peek through to enliven the yellow/orange of the pears.  Today I need to prepare more papers for the table and background.

This is my studio. It's small, but efficient.  I can reach most of what I need without ever getting out of my chair.  In summertime it's hot, but in winter the small size makes it easy to warm with a baseboard space heater.  There isn't really enough natural light either, so I have a shop light (hidden by the sloped ceiling here), a full spectrum Ott light and a desk lamp for when I'm working after dark.  Today is the shortest day, so the lights go on a little after 4:00 in the afternoon.  Solstice tomorrow and then the light begins to return!

The low level of the sun in December makes for some dramatic lighting.  This is the poinsettia I bought from the high school FFA sale.  Last year the plant looked good right up to the point when I marched it to the compost heap, and let it make room for more summery plants.