Fruit Stand (in Progress)

It has been slow going this past week. Due to a rather strange incident involving too much coffee, a stack of interesting papers, and a ladder, a week ago this past Sunday I broke my toe. Therefore, every evening after work I spent my time lying on the sofa with my foot obediently propped up on pillows and packed in ice. Hard to paint in that position.

I'm at the scary part of the painting -- time to proceed very carefully because if the values are wrong here it will ruin everything! It's been much trickier than I had imagined to work in color from a black and white photograph. (I'm still trying to figure out what some of the fruit is supposed to be.) I have a sneaky feeling that the white coat on the shopkeeper will be too light for the painting, and had even considered changing it to a darker or more subdued color; then I looked at the high shine on the gentleman's shoes and knew -- his coat would be WHITE.

Oh, if no one ever sees this painting again we'll all know it was a bust. Good learning, but a bust none-the-less. This has been my first attempt at anything "real" with oil pastels and I've loved how they are a "globby" and vague rather than detailed. Fun stuff.