A painting a day: #3, The Three Sisters

I didn’t set out to paint a different number of items each day, but it just happened. I get bored easily and altering the number of things in the grouping seemed an easy way to shake things up. So after one gourd and two crabapples, it pleased me to select three small turnips for my third painting.

I went very simple with these. Each turnip is made of just four applications of color: a light “white,” a darker version of the same, and two layers of the same purple (because the first layer didn’t come out dark enough). The whitest area is just paper left blank.

I’d intended to do a colored background, as I did with the previous paintings, but it seemed wrong with the turnips somehow. So I just left it. It’ll make an interesting contrast with the others, if I continue to do backgrounds on all the other paintings — it’ll be like a borderless panel in a comic.

This picture only took me 43 minutes, compared to more than twice that for the gourd.

Also I’ve begun giving these painting titles, mostly because it entertains me to do so… and because it especially amused me to do so for the painting I’ll show you tomorrow. (I’ve gone back in and added titles to the posts for #1 and #2.)

Here are the three paintings together, a little wonky because the corner of the paper is lifting up:

Come back tomorrow for painting #4 — this project will have me blogging on weekends for the first time in years!

CategoriesA painting a day

Tagsdaily practices, food, painting a day, projects, watercolor, watercolor painting, watercolors

7 Comments

Shra 8 November 2013 at 11:44 am

Are we turnips?

1. tamgerines 9 November 2013 at 2:38 am
  
  must be
  
  1. satsumaart 9 November 2013 at 11:47 am
    
    There are worse things to be. 😉
    
2. satsumaart 9 November 2013 at 11:47 am
  
  I wasn’t thinking about that when I painted them, but after I titled everything else, “three sisters” just seemed right for this one. 😉
  
Ingidisa 9 November 2013 at 6:21 am

Are these from photographs or did you scan them? The paper detail is so crisp! Nice work, btw. I also have a painting a day project. After a short time, it feels a little like a job, but I learn a lot.

1. satsumaart 9 November 2013 at 11:50 am
  
  Thanks very much, Ingidisa! They’re photographs. These ones came out fairly well but it depends very much on the light in the apartment and the colors I used — my camera doesn’t like reds very much. At home I used to scan, but now that we’re traveling, the camera is more practical. 🙂
  
  I took a quick look at your paintings and they’re lovely! Many of them have a really wonderful sense of life — not quite motion, but almost.
  
A painting a day: #14, We See You | satsumabug.com 20 November 2013 at 10:03 am

[…] simplified them. With this third one, at first I thought that wasn’t an option; the original turnips were pretty much as simple as you can get. Then I realized there was still a way I could pare down: […]