art of a peel

A Creative Life, animals in art, artist book, cat portrait, Cats in art, creative thinking, drawing as thinking, fine art, sketchbook

I’ve been busy lately working on a new fine art piece that has an orange peel in it. And a cat of course. Here’s a picture of me at work…

ClancyAtWorkPurrHappyHour72.jpg

Between 7 and 14 of us get together once a month for happy hour in one of our local pubs, and the trays of drinks that arrive at our table often reminds me of a jewelers tray. So I’m trying to capture that festive feeling in my painting.

This has meant, as I’ve worked on my composition (the to-scale drawing you see to the right in the above photo), a practice of sketching various drinks in my kitchen sketchbook. I used ink and gouache in my sketchbook – and I’m using acrylic in the painting. Below is the first sketchbook practice drawing; the drink recipe, an orange hot toddy, turned out very well in the real-life tasting of it – the drawing in my sketchbook of the orange-peel didn’t turn out so well.

OrangeToddyBest72

But I remembered the phrase “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly at first” from my book, Dr. Bob’s Emotional Repair Program First Aid Kit, and kept going.

In other sketchbook pages I tried more orange-peel attempts and here below is the last sketchbook orange-peel drawing – and the drink recipe that I decided to use within the painting.

FlatironMartini72

Below is a close-up photo of the drinks I’ve put in the painting – including the one with the orange peel:

TrayDetail72.jpg

I’ll post a photo of the finished art when its, well, finished – there’s still more to do on the cat.

5 thoughts on “art of a peel

  1. I love this painting so far and look forward to seeing it complete. I love that you have that weekly tradition. One of the things I miss from back home is getting together once a month with my art friends and having cocktails. We met in each other’s houses and the host would introduce a new cocktail or even create one. It was always fun. And if I was the designated driver, I would take my cocktail rations home in ziplock bags, which always made my husband laugh. I love the idea of the orange peel in the hot toddy. I will need to try that some time.

    1. Wow! That sounds like such fun! I would miss that kind of get-together that you describe too. When you try the orange hot toddy drink please imagine me sharing your table and sketching with you. šŸ™‚ Prior to moving to the Pacific Northwest I’d never encountered such a get-together – but in the PNW it’s common. Sometimes the meet-ups can be found via facebook, hosted by a winery, brewery etc. – usually cleverly titled something like “Drink and Draw” or “Pour and Paint”. There’s an origami group that meets in a local winery here called “Sip and Fold”. I’ve not been yet – but it sounds fun. Oh, and thanks for your kind comment on my art-in-progress. Cheers to you!

      1. I shall absolutely clink my glass and say slainte to you when I imbibe. I’m having a three month long period of total sobriety right now, as I do every year, and this winter is seriously testing my will power in that regard.

Thank you for reading and sharing encouragements!