Desserts

"Chocolate Eclair" by Lesley Spanos. Oil painting on acrylic-toned canvas panel, 5" x 5". Copyright ©2009 Lesley Spanos, all rights reserved.

How many starving children can be fed with one chocolate eclair? I’m listing this little painting on The Daily Paintworks Help the Children of Africa Challenge. Proceeds from the sale will be donated to World Vision to help feed drought-stricken children in Africa.

Here’s how it works:
The painting is up for auction on the Daily Paintworks site. When the seven day auction is over, the winning bidder pays me via the DPW auction website. Then I send 100% of the donation to World Vision, and a receipt as proof of donation to the buyer. Buyer gets the painting, and I get the tax deduction. I’m throwing in free shipping anywhere in the United States.

I want to make sure this painting sells because any amount is helpful, so I’m starting the auction at a low, low price of only $30!

"Chocolate, Vanilla, Chocolate" by Lesley Spanos. Oil on diagonal 6 x 6" Gessobord panel. Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

Our Different Strokes From Different Folks challenge subject this week is cupcakes. Now, I love cupcakes, even if I don’t eat them. In fact, I firmly believe that some of the most exciting things happening in the arts these days are taking place in cupcake world. If you want to see what I mean, take a look at one of my favorite blogs, Cupcakes Take The Cake. Such creativity! We painters find it hard to do anything that hasn’t been done before, but the cupcake artists are giddy with exploring new territory every day. Or maybe it’s just a sugar high.

Karin’s reference photo was reminiscent of a Wayne Thiebaud painting. He’s one of my absolute favorite artists of all time, so to try to copy him would be a sacrilege. I’d fall terribly short of my goal and embarrass myself. Like this:

"I'm no Wayne Thiebaud" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic on 7 x 5" museum board. Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

But I had to try. This first attempt was done with a lot of modeling paste in the “frosting.” I thought I could shape it to look like 3-d, but it was a lot harder than I expected. I mean, do I let the frosting cast its own shadows and light the painting just right when it’s done, or do I paint the shadows in in addition to the texture so if the lighting isn’t just right they will still show? I can’t remember how Thiebaud did it. I just know that mine looked lame no matter what I did to it, and it was impossible to photograph the texture.

So, that’s the tosser.

My second attempt was more traditional, with little texture, and shadows painted in. The hardest part was getting all those little confetti quins the right color in both light and shadow.

Here are a few images taken along the way:

Happy one year anniversary to all Strokers!

"Chocolate Mousse Heart Cake" by Lesley Spanos. Oil painting on 5 x 5" Gessobord. Copyright ©2009 Lesley Spanos, all rights reserved.

So for Valentine’s Day, I watched my husband eat cake. We searched several bakeries to find just the right cake. Something oooey-goooey and yummy for him (chocolate, of course), and something visually delightful for me to paint. Don’t pity me – we also found a great deal on a couple of small lobster tails for Valentine’s dinner. The hubby grilled them. OMG, they were amazing, and such a beautiful red-orange color!

Here are some shots I took along the way:

Eventually I’ll get around to painting the whole cake, but for now I decided to start with a slice so the chocolate mousse filling – yet another interesting element – would be exposed.

This is the first time I’ve used Ampersand Gessobord (note spelling – no “a” in “bord”), and it was a little different than painting on canvas. I had to fight the acrylic underpainting to get it to go on evenly, but overall, I was pleased. Any problems I have with it are just a matter of inexperience. Because it’s smooth, this stuff will be better than canvas for reproductions. Nothing screams “reproduction” louder than a canvas weave printed on flat paper.

I’m really enjoying my new tube of M. Graham Terra Rosa. It works great for painting the red-toned chocolate frosting and cake.  What I’m sorely missing in my palette is a good cool red or magenta so I can mix a nice magenta-pink color for the berries.

Here’s most of the painting blocked in, with details just starting to take shape.  The blackberry in the foreground was starting to look really sumptuous  at this point, like it’s bursting with sweet juice. I wish I’d added just a tiny bit more detail and stopped there.

But did I? Noooo! Of course not! I ignored the nice suggestions made after my last post, and worked it until the paint was exhausted and screaming for mercy. The direction the painting was going was definitely “worse” rather than “better,” so I decided to call it done and post it. That’s the “finished” piece, up above.

As I wrote this post, I found myself whining about how the blackberry in the foreground didn’t look as good as it did in the last stage. That berry really bothered me. It was all I could see. It’s always like that for me – if I paint twenty things right, it’s the one wrong thing that grabs 100% of my attention. “Why whine?” I asked myself. “Just fix it!”

So I grabbed it off the drying rack and blacked out both berries before I lost my nerve:

Once I did that, the whole balance of the painting changed for the better. The top berry receded into the background more, and the foreground berry no longer competed for attention with the chocolate frosting. The composition didn’t look as jumbled because I’d made the primary and secondary elements more clear.

In the end, the trick was in putting on just enough detail to make black holes look like berries, without ending up with the same too-detailed- too-light berries I painted before. I redid them a couple more times, and learned a little something each time.  I made a conscious effort to keep the colors dark, and use as few brushstrokes as possible. I’m satisfied now.

Thanks for stopping by and reading my ramblings!

Here's how the cake looked on Valentine's Day before I slaughtered it for the sake of art. Copyright ©2009 Lesley Spanos, all rights reserved.

"Chocolate Caramel Lava Cake" by Lesley Spanos. Oil painting on 5 x 5" canvas on panel. Copyright © Lesley Spanos 2009, all rights reserved.

The hubby has fully embraced the idea of me painting desserts and him eating them. Thanks to his enthusiastic purchases, I already have hundreds of dessert photos and a backlog of subjects awaiting me! There was this chocolate caramel lava cake he brought home last week, followed by an individual heart cake dipped in white chocolate and swirled with dark chocolate. Then there was the decadent chocolate mousse multi-serving heart-shaped layer cake we both picked out on Valentine’s Day. It had some pretty glazed berries on top that caught the light beautifully, so I’m really looking forward to painting that one sometime this week.

As always, here are some shots taken along the way:

The canvas, toned with acrylics.  I toned a handful of these a couple of weeks ago, which is why all the recent ones have been pretty much the same color. This one’s a little dark. I find I like them best when they’re a couple of steps lighter than my darkest shadow color.

The drawing is done with waterproof ink, directly on the canvas.

That bit of caramel on the top was a PITA to do, but I learned a lot and next time it will be easier. What I wasn’t getting at first is that it’s a little translucent, and a tiny bit of light shines through it.

Because the underpainting was too dark, I had to scrub in a halo of light around the cake so it wouldn’t be lost in the background.

This was my first fork. Yes, I was a virgin, but now that I have forked, I must admit that I liked it! It was much less painful than I thought it would be. Just a matter of observing the colors and painting what I saw.

I’ve also been forced to scrub a haze of lighter color on the foreground.

Note to self: Next time make the underpainting lighter!

Added some highlights, and we’re done! It actually looks much better in person than it does in a photo. We’re going to keep this one – I promised it to the hubby for Valentine’s Day.

"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.

"Pastry #1" by Lesley Spanos. 5 x 5" oil and acrylic painting on canvas panel. ©2009, all rights reserved.

After the problems I had with the last painting, I needed a small victory, so I pulled out some photos I took over the weekend.

This is a chocolate almond pastry my husband had for dessert on Sunday.  I don’t eat sugar, so I sent him to the bakery with a request to get something pretty enough to paint.

Can’t go wrong with chocolate, right? Sunday was our own self-declared holiday, “Decadence Day,” and I wanted him to have something really yummy. To other Americans, it’s Superbowl Sunday, but our team was out of the playoffs early this year so we didn’t have anything to celebrate on the football front. I think there should be a national Decadence Day. Especially in our troubled times, there should be one day a year when we do nothing but pamper ourselves, a day of pure self-indulgence with no worries about buying gifts or handing out candy.  Just sleep late. Eat chocolate. Trade massages. Enjoy life!

Here are some photos I took along the way. One thing I should mention is that I’m just getting back into oil painting after a long absence, so I’m still feeling my way through the process. My way isn’t neccessarily the “right” way. It’s just how I manged to muddle through it.

Once again, I started with a canvas toned with acrylic paint in big, loose strokes, then drew a rough outline in ink. I tried to make it a chocolaty color.

Then I started painting the cherry and gold disk with oils.

Painting that gold disk was on was tons of fun! I think painting metal is like painting water – you just have to blur your eyes a bit and paint what you see.

In the house painting I just finished, I felt like I covered too much of the underpainting, so my goal this time was to leave as much of it exposed as possible. I didn’t thin the paint much until the end. At this phase I was still scrubbing tiny bits of thick paint into the canvas with a stiff brush, feathering out the edges so my underpainting showed through.

The thinned paint came at the end, when I was adding the chocolate and cherry drizzles. There was also confectioners sugar on the original pastry, but I chickened out when it came to adding it to my painting. At this point, I like what I’ve done, and I’m afraid of ruining it!

Once again, I think I might have overworked it a bit, but I’m still pleased with it. No struggles, no feelings of inadequacy. I breezed right through it, maybe two hours, tops. That doesn’t happen often, so I have to savor it when it does!

I popped it into a chunky gold frame. I like how the gold of the frame is duller than the “gold” I painted. It makes it look a little more “real” somehow.

Confession:
I did eat one decadent forkful of this dessert. It’s the first processed sugar I’ve had in about three years. I thought it was be amazing, but it was just way too sweet!