The Last Eggplant

The Last Eggplant

6 x 5 inches, acrylic on gessoed watercolor paper

Copyright - Sydney Harper

I like gardening but it really isn't a big priority for me. I had a small vegetable garden this summer but I started to forget about it as the weather got cooler. I went out the other day to clean it up a little bit and discovered it was doing quite well. Since we had our first serious frost last night, I went out and gathered up the last of the vegetables. This almost perfect little eggplant was one of them and I just couldn't resist painting it.

The painting is on a small piece of gessoed watercolor paper. Years ago I bought a sampler pack of watercolor paper and a pack of oriental paper from Daniel Smith. At that time, you got a huge variety of papers but they were small pieces. Now you get a smaller variety but large sheets. I've been using some of the oriental papers but I had forgotten about the watercolor papers until I found them a while back. So I took a couple of the sheets that I knew I wouldn't use for watercolor and applied some gesso. This particular sheet is a little thinner than I'd like but it worked well. It's a quick little painting but I'm pleased with it.

Cicada Sketch

Cicada, colored pencil
by Sydney Harper

I was doing an end of summer porch cleaning the other day and came across a dead cicada, in almost perfect condition. I couldn't help myself. I had to bring him to sketch. What, you mean everyone doesn't save dead bugs they find on the porch? I finally got around to drawing it yesterday. It was a little bit of an awkward angle but it still worked out okay.

While I was drawing this, I remembered a web site I found a while back. It was one of those times when I found link on a blog and then found another link and, well, you get the picture. Often I see people wanting to know the best way to prepare images for the web and was to protect their images. Science-art.com has a tutorial on preparing images for the web and another on protecting images. The instructions are geared towards images placed on their own site but I think the instructions could be easily adapted to your own situation.

Other than that, I've been very busy the past couple of weeks. Things are just now easing up a bit so hopefully I work in more art time.