i love strawberries

My very talented friend Naisi loves working with ink and watercolor, and as I haven't really played in that world I was inspired by her work to take the leap and do some experimenting. My friend works mostly on watercolor postcards, so I bought a pack myself as well as some permanent ink pens in a variety of tip sizes. I already had the watercolors.

The first thing I did was some free play with the pens to get an idea of what effect I could achieve with the different tip sizes. Then I looked around my desk to figure out if there was something worth painting. If you remember, I created a little strawberry pot arrangement out of clay (I have a blog post and pictures here) and I've been keeping it on my desk - so I decided I would paint a picture of it!

I started out, as I always do, with a pencil sketch of the planter. Then, I felt confident enough with my pens to select a tip size to trace over my pencil work to create the ink outline for my painting.

inking over my pencil lines - usually when I do watercolors I will just do pencil and paint directly over the pencil lines

finished ink outline after pencil lines have been erased

I completed the ink work but it was several weeks before I found myself with time again for art (which was last night, I'd had a bit of a difficult weekend so I needed an escape).

My original intention was to play with salting the wet paint to create texture to represent the dimples on the strawberries. Unfortunately, the scale of my painting was too small for this technique to be effective. Instead, I pulled out one of my smaller tipped pens and drew in the dimples.

after painting in the ink outline

I decided after painting my original ink outline that the piece needed some kind of border to look complete. I sat and thought about it for several minutes, then just started with a simple line border and built on it from there.

the finished piece with border

me holding the finished piece for scale - this is under my desk lamp

the painting next to the model - it's about actual size!

I think I'm going to do a few more little paintings like this - I'm glad I tried the technique, it was a lot of fun!

~ m.d.