Strawberries

Summer is strawberry time. Not the hothouse kind. These are from the U-pick at Swanton Farms in Pescadero. The trouble with U-pick is it’s so much fun that you pick more than you can eat. And after sharing with neighbors and friends, we were still eating them at breakfast, lunch and dinner, in shakes, salads and by themselves.

Here’s the bowl of strawberries I ate and drew.

Sometimes, I paint something over and over, in quick succession, because there’s bits of every piece I want to change once I do it. Take #1, I thought, lacked highlights on the berries, particularly the one in the foreground. (Yes, my photo shows it didn’t catch the light at all, but still, I would have liked to leave some indication of the little seeds on it.)

So here is Take 2, perhaps going too far the other way? Little bitty spots everywhere?

Take 3 didn’t solve any of my earlier issues but was fun to do. Paint first, line later with a watersoluble pencil before the paint was totally dry.

In retrospect I like bits and pieces of all 3 pieces. But I can see why I wanted to redo them too. Do you do this?: Redraw/repaint things over and over in quick succession? If you do, what do you do with all the pieces you end up with? My wonderful flat files that store all my work that’s not in sketchbooks are getting to where they’re filling up… These little pieces should be finding new homes, so I can keep painting!