#blueberrypie

With my upcoming summer show in Maine in mind, I bring you Blueberry Pie. Blueberries are the beloved Maine state fruit.

We are blueberry pie fans and serve this often, especially during Open Studios. Bonnie selects goodies from Riviera Bakehouse that go with my paintings. I took lots of photos of this lattice pie a few years back after Liv, the owner of Riviera, pointed out that few bakeries do lattice work any more because of the labor costs.

I’ve painted blueberry pie before and blueberry cheesecake. So I got out indigo blue for the berries and alizaron crimson for that luscious cranberry-colored juice that is part of the blueberry pie experience.

As I write this blog, I’m still working on this painting after a full day’s work. That’s because there was a slight structural flaw that I didn’t catch until the end.

Things started off well.

The crust was looking good now that I found out the secret color for painting baked goods –  raw sienna. At this point, the flaw in the drawing still isn’t obvious. Can you see it yet?

I finally noticed it when I started working on the tin. Take a closer look at the height of the tin going all the way around. It’s not consistent. In fact, one side (bottom of painting) looks almost half as high as the other (top).

This problem gets more obvious as the tin gets darker. If you check out the reference photo, you see that some of the disparity comes from the angle of the shot. The rest comes from the evolution from pencil to paint, when the width of the brush can change the trajectory of the circles. And it did here.

Tonight I spent an hour and a half trying to gain some height on the bottom. I think I did. Unfortunately the tin got too dark and I lost some of that big lip on the tin near the bottom, but that was the only way to fix it. This is where I stopped for the night.

I estimated that it would take at least 2 hours to work on the tin, and it did. Since I used Q-tips to carefully wipe the paint from the tin, the remaining paint was just dry enough to work effectively this morning.

While I’m happy with this painting, I still have this weird compulsion to work on it to make it perfect. I’m glad this is a Challenge painting because I have to put it down – a good thing while it’s still fresh.

My Day 28 painting is all sketched out and ready to go. I just have to get to it! Stay tuned.