14 March 2013

Cowboy Caliente, Take Two

I tried it again. I simplified, took away the bowl and the can of corn, and had a little fun with the label on the bottle of hot sauce. I'm happier with this result.



Notes about watercolor: It's so easy to go too far. It's so easy not to go quite far enough.

On the first one, I went too far on the avocado and it got muddy, so I was careful to leave variation in color on this one. On this one, I was about to call it a day when I noticed the tiny cast shadows beneath the stems of the tomato, onto the tomato's surface, so I added those and it really improved it.

As I look at this one, I can see that I need to go back in with a little more shadow on the underside of the garlic bulbs, as I did on the first one--I'm still a little hazy on the effects of cast shadow (especially when the objects are in weak, neutral light rather than with a strong light source, as these were on my patio). Practice, practice, it all gets used. On to the next recipe...

Question: Does it bother anybody that there is no horizon line? Do the cast shadows sufficiently "seat" the objects on a surface, without indicating a surface in some other way?

10 March 2013

Serve with tortilla chips!

Another recipe illustration, this one for "Cowboy Caviar," which is kind of a salsa, made with corn and black-eyed peas, tomatoes and avocado (and a bunch of other stuff), and seasoned with vinegar, oil, garlic, and hot sauce. I wanted to include something "cowboy" in the drawing, so for this one I put it in the title of the hot sauce. (There actually IS a hot sauce out there called Caliente Cowboy, by F. McClintock's, but the packaging was way too complicated for me to reproduce, so I just made this up.)



This is probably a redo; I chose to use the paper vertically, and ran out of room in this rather horizontal layout. Also, there are parts I like a lot, and parts with which I'm not happy. But I think I'll move on to something else for now, and try this again in a couple of days. If I do the same thing over again right in a row, I tend to get impatient/discouraged/burnt out more quickly. For the next one, I want to try adding a visual (instead of just a title) for the "cowboy" part--we'll see!