Happy National Chocolate Covered Cherries Day! Chocolate covered anything is usually good but I love the tartness of the cherries and the sweetness of the chocolate. And since today's prompt is "chocolate", it was perfect!
I usually start with a loose pencil sketch of what I want to draw. And I usually ink my drawing with the Platinum Carbon Pen but I decided to go directly to watercolors today. And I decided to use the Holbein palette.
For the chocolate, I used burnt umber and burnt sienna. I also added ultramarine blue for shadow areas.
I love the "black" you get from burnt umber and ultramarine. And since I was using ultramarine for the plate shadows, it made for a more harmonizing palette.
The cherries were done with vermillion and Crimson lake, with a bit of ultramarine added in the shadow areas. For the most part, I remembered to leave white areas for highlights. But I still had to use my Posca paint pen for white in some areas.
I'm very happy with the results. It's a little more intimidating for me to not to ink before adding watercolors and I had to leave a bit of white space between some edges. I enjoyed the process, though it was not the loose style of painting that I'm used to these days.
Changing topics, my youngest is involved in a program called Better Together sponsored by NFTY (National Federation of Temple Youth). It teams 7th and 8th grade students with seniors living in a retirement community once a month for fun interactions. They meet once a month. The kids are organizing a bingo night for the seniors and we were asked to bring some goodies for prizes. So I made these bookmarks using homemade ink sprays. I used acrylic letter stamps for the words and tied a ribbon. I'm really happy with the way these turned out because I'm usually stamp-challenged. I'm just not very patient and usually smear the ink or misalign the stamp. But these turned out okay.
Now, my daughter and I are off to bake some cookies for the seniors. Hope you're having a wonderful Sunday!
Those cherries look better than the real ones!!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Mia!
DeleteCherries are one of two foods I most look forward to at christmastime. Chocolate dipped ones would be heaven!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Aniko! They are delicious!
DeleteYummers! My favorite all time favorite candy is chocolate covered cherries. I've never had the fresh fruit dipped in chocolate though. I do like the kind covered in dark chocolate with a clear filling. I love the interaction between young ones and seniors. As a youth back in the dark ages, I always preferred the company of older ones. You can learn so much. Have a good week, Angelcake.
ReplyDeleteDeedles
I love the fresh cherries dipped in chocolate better! They just gave the right amount of sweetness and tartness! You just can't go wrong with chocolate!
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