#Belgium

This quiet pastel painting is quite a contrast to the bold, graphic paintings from Day 24 Salmon in Red, White and Black and Day 25 Classic 1959 Dodge, which is maybe what I needed.

Thank you, Betty Heller, for sending me the photo for Macarons after your trip to Belgium, which was taken at the inimitable DelRey shop in Antwerp. It’s a beautiful composition and I’ve been looking at it for about a year, but that’s all – looking…. until now.

Despite the fact that I had never painted a single macaron, I plunged ahead with this rather ambitious painting of 24 macaron (not macaroon, so Bonnie tells me). I hesitated before starting, but knew I was painting well (practice makes perfect). With the official Challenge ending soon, I knew it wouldn’t be the end of the world if this took 2 days – and it did. Besides, I’m already 3 days behind, so what’s another day. Here’s where I started and ended the first day.

After painting 10 macarons yesterday, today went a little easier. It’s funny how I started seeing these as mouths (especially the ones with the dark frosting). I just plodded along, experimenting with subtle differences in colors to try and capture soft tones, which is something different for me. Near the end, I started working on the light and shadows to bring life to the piece.

This is definitely a painting I wouldn’t have tried without the Challenge. And it took almost a month of intense painting before I felt confident enough to tackle it.

I took a risk and it paid off. Having said that, tomorrow I’ll be working on something a little less risky. I’ll try and get 2-3 more paintings in before making a collage of all my Challenge work, which I’ll post here.

The collage will be a great opportunities to look back with me at all that I accomplished in September. I hope you’ll join me.