Slow Burner

Last night my sleep was interrupted at around 5.30am by thoughts of an as-yet unpainted picture. As I lay there wishing I was still asleep, I got on to thinking about other paintings for which I have plans. There is one in particular which I’ve been working up to for, oh, I would say about a mere 18 months. Turns out that today was its lucky day!

So here it is, having made the leap from my imagination to reality. Not the most sexy of subjects, but I wanted to try to explore the colours and reflections hidden in the stainless steel. I also wanted to experiment with the shapes of the cutlery which aren’t totally straightforward when you look at them carefully – the tines of the fork in particular. My pencil outlines first took a lot of doing today! Interestingly, the watercolour colour chart I made recently came in very handy for getting some interesting combinations; I’m especially fond of the colour in the knife blade. In a breakthrough move I didn’t use Payne’s Grey although I did press-gang Indigo into service instead for the darker shades.

All in all I’m actually quite pleased with this picture, which makes me wonder whether I should wait for (and think about) pictures more often before setting brush to paper. Although 18 months might be a bit of a long lead time…