#strawberrytart

Keeping with the Grand Central inspired dessert theme (Day 9. Cranberry Cheesecake and Day 7. Rugelach), here’s a Strawberry Blueberry Tart from Financier Patisserie that I have been wanting to paint for a long time.

A few years back, I did this 3 x 4 food oil painting of Financier’s pastry display.

I always thought the heroes of this work were the brilliantly colored tarts. Painting a single strawberry tart was on my mind for a few years. This was my chance. Can you tell which one I was inspired to paint?

Although today’s tart painting turned out pretty good, most of the day was a painting fail. I was going to use the word “disaster” but it sounded too Trumpian.

The plan was to do a piece of key lime pie on a plate with a fork. However, I started putting paint on the 5 x 7 inch panel sketch before realizing the plate in my sketch looked distorted. I tried different lines, colors and backgrounds to camouflage it, but the painting couldn’t be saved. The structural problem might have been solved if I cropped the composition in a square format.

In previous blogs, you’ve heard me talk about paintings that I thought were lost, but were saved after I kept going. This time I decided I didn’t want to save this one. It wasn’t worth it when I had another painting sketched and ready to go.

Now I had 16 brushes to clean, and not a painting to show for it!

At 7pm after a dinner break, I refined the sketch, added a blueberry in the center, and fixed structural issues before putting paint to the panel (yes, I can learn from my mistakes!) I stopped painting at around 1am, satisfied that I had saved the day with a valiant if not rushed effort, and I could rest easy.

I picked up the painting again this morning on 6 hours sleep and spent over hours (my time limit) adding the seeds, completing the strawberries, and putting shadows on the pastry. Done. Proud.

This was a humbling experience, and a reminder not to get too cocky after having a good, relatively easy first week.

Sometimes failure is good, as long as it doesn’t happen too many times during the Challenge…