Tiramisu

» Posted by Lesley Spanos on Feb 10, 2009 in Desserts, Food and Wine, Oils, Step-by-step, Still Life | 3 comments

"Tiramisu" by Lesley Spanos. Oil painting on 5 x 5" canvas panel. Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

My husband tells me he’s “on board 100%” with the idea of me painting more desserts. He gets to eat them, I get to photograph and paint them. Years ago, it would have driven me insane to look at something like this and not eat it, but now I find I really am over sugar.

So for our latest effort he brought home this Tiramisu. As Tiramisu goes, it wasn’t the most attractive, but he said it tasted great.

Here are some images taken along the way:

Once again, I started with an acrylic underpainting on one of my homemade 5 x 5″ canvas panels. I could buy panels, but they’d cost more and I wouldn’t have the same kind of control I have with these. If I make them myself, I can make any size I want, and I know exactly what kind of materials were used.

The drawing is done in ink, and the Tiramisu is painted in oils.

I thought the chocolate-covered coffee bean would be the hardest part, but also the most gratifying if I could get it right. It turns out the coffee bean was easy. It was the whipped cream that was hard! I fussed with it quite a bit before deciding I’d done as much as I could with it.

Looking back, I think maybe I should have rounded the cake pieces so they looked more like the biscuits traditionally used, rather than sharp-edged cut strips of cake our bakery used as a shortcut. Sometimes I follow the photo too closely and forget that it’s my painting, and I can build my painted Tiramisu any way I want.

I’m enjoying these little desserts so much, I’m already planning a series of them so I can group a couple dozen of them together on a poster. My only worry is that my husband will gain 20 lbs if I keep painting this stuff.