Friday, December 14, 2012

Maureen's Pastries


Maureen's Pastries 8x8" Acrylic  Click to Bid
I've never been good at drawing from imagination. But when your model moves, or worse yet, implodes in front of you, there's not much you can do but work from memory. That was the case in class today. One of my students brought in the most stunning of pastries, real show stoppers. No sooner had we begun painting when one of them split down the middle and began to bleed - chocolate, oozing from the middle cavity (the pastry, not the student). OK, we can deal with this, I thought, and gave my students a "show must go on" pep talk. Soon after, it was as if someone had removed its skeleton... and splat, flat, yuk. I was kicking myself for not doing a sketch first - I had no drawing to look at, no values, no nothing, except my feeble memory. Not a good place to be. OK, at least 'its a great exercise', if somewhat a drag, to mentally re-create this model in a younger, perkier stage of life.  We all struggled today, but at least we left class reasonably intact - more than I can say for the poor pastries that were disected, devoured and quickly put out of their misery.

4 comments:

Jo Mackenzie said...

Great story of the artists dilemma especially when butter cream is involved.
That stuff hates heat or warmth...hence the "butter" part.

Patti Mollica said...

so thats the culprit - butter cream! it couldn't take the hot source light, but it tasted awesome no matter what shape it was in

Mary Sheehan Winn said...

amazing values. The grays in this just sing.
I love what you did with this.

mohammad said...
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