finished pears and work interrupted

'Simply Pears', 7.5" x 10.5", Coloured Pencil on Colourfix Paper

Copyright Teresa Mallen

Here is a picture of the finished pears. This was a fun, undemanding piece (with the exception of the previously mentioned background experiment).

You may have noticed the dates posted for the pears. While coloured pencil has a reputation for being a slow medium, it really isn't this slow! :-) July has had some unexpected events and it hasn't been the productive month I had hoped. I look forward to July and August. I normally end my teaching gigs by the end of June and I usually anticipate catching up on my to-do list over the eight weeks of summer. This summer has the added responsibility of getting the farm where my parents lived ready to be sold. But, there have been other hiccups along the way.

The province of Ontario is currently switching all of the land titles and deeds from one type of registry to an automated one. We found out this month that a lakefront property that my sister and I inherited did not make the transfer. Our deed got flagged as missing a severance stamp and we now had a Planning Act Violation and an invalid deed. Kind of reminds me of my painting getting held up at customs! After much angst and two law firms working on our behalf we have discovered that the original severance and issuing of a deed was in fact done properly by our parents but we still have to have a lawyer argue our case. This has been an unexpected drain on my time this month.

In addition, my 16 year old car is suddenly having some issues and it has become clear that the time has come to replace it. So I have begrudgingly spent many hours in the past two weeks test driving cars, reading consumer reports, etc. I don't like to shop, I am a frugal gal who doesn't like to spend money and I like buying cars even less. Grrrr....

So now it is the last week of July and things are looking up. The legal issue is now being dealt with by a lawyer. I am close to making a car decision. Most importantly, I am packing to go to Atlanta this week to attend the Colored Pencil Society of America's Convention. Woo-hoo!

Wildlife update: I have been asked if the deer I mentioned a few weeks ago is still around. Yes she is.


We also have another doe and her twin fawns making appearances. My husband has seen a small black bear twice in the past week. She probably wants my raspberries! The rabbits have taken over the back yard. This is a fenced piece of land so they are safe from coyotes and foxes. Some lilies in my front garden were eaten by the deer and the lilies in the vase below were chewed off of their stems by a rabbit. I guess they weren't tasty. I am not sure if Beatrix Potter would approve but I am starting to sympathize with Mr. McGregor in the Tale of Peter Rabbit.

Actually, if truth be told, I am delighted to have wildlife problems. I love living amongst these animals. I feel truly blessed to see them and it is worth raspberries and chewed lilies. :-)

As I mentioned I shall be away this week attending workshops and meetings at the CPSA convention. No doubt I shall be having a wee bit of fun too. I hope I can find a lampshade to fit my head! LOL Perhaps there shall be some pics in the next post. Of course I shall edit out the incriminating ones!

So how is your summer going? Are things turning out the way you planned and hoped?

simply pears, new cp work in progress

Time for a new piece and for a change from flowers I decided on fruit. I grabbed some pears and headed outside for a bit of a photo shoot. I must admit that my photos leave something to be desired as I was rushing things. My initial thoughts were that I would like to do a simple, rather stark, contemporary piece. I would have liked to use quartz or granite counter tops as a surface but as I don't have either of those in my house I used my old faithful marble pastry board instead. A lot of great pie dough has been rolled out on that marble! Humm...how about a pear tart? Oops, I digress...

The above photo is one of my not so great reference photos but that's okay as I cropped it anyway. I created a drawing and the image below shows how it looked once I transferred my drawing to my paper and started adding colour.


I chose an olive green sheet of Colourfix paper to work on. I wanted a change from white Stonehenge and I wanted to work on something sanded. The piece is approximately 7 1/2" x 10 1/2" in size. If you haven't tried coloured paper and you are not sure how to transfer a drawing to a coloured surface (or to a paper that is too thick to use a light box) please click here for a description of how to do it. Just scroll down to the question section.

In the above photo, I have put down three different pencil colours to make up the background. The pears are untouched and are still the colour of the paper. I started in on the marble with a first layer of pigment. Then I started to wing it when I should have proceeded with caution. The picture doesn't show what I did next.

After stopping to take a photo, I decided to tackle depicting the dark veins in the marble. I also decided to bump up the detail in the marble to make it more striking (and more like granite). So I started in applying dark streaks all over the place. I wasn't sure it was working but I kept going. Well, when I was finished I knew it didn't work. It was just too busy for the simplicity of the piece. And uh oh, I had got quite carried away and there was a lot of pigment down! Darn.

So I got out my tape and I started to lift...and lift...and lift. It wasn't coming off evenly but hey maybe another layer of pigment would cover it. I tried that. Nope, now it was worse - a real streaky mess. So back to the lifting. Finally I decided that this wasn't doing the job so I reached for my electric eraser. I had hesitated to use it as I thought it might remove the sanded texture of the paper. But hey, things were looking too awful to leave it the way it was. You know what? It worked! Like a charm. Yippee! The lesson I relearned here was that when things really don't seem to be working, stop and assess what is happening. I should have done a test on a scrap bit of paper to see if I liked the marble look. I was impatient and I paid the price. Lifting and erasing took too much time and was quite boring.

So I continued on and started in on the pears.



So at this point, there is still work to be done. I haven't finished the pears (you can still see the green paper at the bottom of the front pear), the shadows are not done and I shall tweak the new non-marble background colour. I should have stopped to take a picture of the awful 'marble' background before I erased it. It was truly hideous! :-)

Now for some garden photos...yarrow

More yarrow...I love yellow in my gardens.

For some shocking pink, good ol' phlox.

I shall show you the finished pears in my next post.

The moral of this post is that sometimes it is best just to keep things simple...oh and slowing down to do a test strip saves time in the long run.