Playing With Pears

I've been playing around with some old exercises from Robert Burridge.  He does workshops all over the USA, and I've taken two of them.  In his workshops he always uses acrylic, since it's nontoxic and dries quickly.  But instead of using acrylics, I decided to play with his method of painting pears using a little patterned collage paper and water mixable oil paints. 

None of these little paintings are especially impressive individually, but I like them like this, done in a series.  Each one has a different pattern in the collage paper under the pear.  So each is similar, but a little different.

I also liked using up old materials.  Here I used old leftover mat board cut to a 11x14 inches, or else old watercolor paper ripped to the same size and coated with gesso.  It irks me to waste materials, especially when I'm just playing around. All of these can go right in a pre-cut purchased mat, no fuss.