Poinsettia-Day 7

© Ellen Blonder

I'm starting to lay in more color on the bracts, and I've added details to the tiny central flowers. And for the new year, I hope to be posting more regularly again. Happy New Year, everyone!

Poinsettia-Days 5 to 6

© Ellen Blonder

The green leaves are just about finished, and I've started shading the bracts roughly. The actual flowers are barely noticeable in the center of the colorful bracts.

Poinsettia-Day 4

© Ellen Blonder

I'm painting in the leaves when I can catch a little time, but I can't paint from life, since the real leaves have started to curl and fall off. I was hoping to have this finished by Christmas. Well, maybe New Year's Day. Happy Holidays, everyone!

Poinsettia-Day 3

© Ellen Blonder

Here's a slight close-up showing a detailed leaf and one pink bract. Holiday stuff is getting in the way of painting. Some of the leaves on this plant have curled up or started drooping, so I'll have to rely on the photos I took for reference.

Poinsettia-Day 2

© Ellen Blonder

I've filled in details and painted in the background color. The green wash is just underpainting to help me see which of the leaves are not going to end up cream-colored.

Poinsettia-Day 1

© Ellen Blonder

I bought an amazing cream-colored poinsettia plant last week, so big that I knocked off one of the branches getting it out of my car. I put that branch in water, and it has been begging to be painted ever since. I'm just beginning to sketch it out on a 16 x 16-inch board.

Dim Sum-Final

© Ellen Blonder

Because this is painted so loosely and on a pretty coarse canvas, I think I'm done. From the upper left, going clockwise, I painted a pork and shrimp steamed dumpling, a sweet sesame-flavored roll, a xiao long bao (Shanghai soup dumpling), spinach-dough dumpling, an unusual tomato-filled dumpling and a leaf-wrapped rice flour roll with sweet bean filling.

In Shanghai, I watched a dumpling crew make the soup dumplings with astonishing speed. Each one is rolled out, filled with a meat filling that includes jellied broth, then closed up with an impossible number of pleats. The broth melts during steaming, making a little soup inside and accounting for the slightly saggy shape. I didn't paint the shreds of ginger or vinegar that usually go with these.

Dim Sum-Day 2

© Ellen Blonder

I've changed some of the dumplings to balance colors and shapes better. Still needs a lot of work, though.

Telephone Doodle

© Ellen Blonder

December's much too busy. That must have been on my mind when I was on the phone today, although this woman doesn't seem terribly concerned about time.

Dim Sum-Day 1

© Ellen Blonder

Part of the fun of China was eating different dim sum from what I've had at home. I'm just starting to work out a painting of some of them; it's pretty rough so far. I might change some of the dumplings. This canvas is 8 x 16 inches, and the dumplings are about twice their actual size.

Christmas Card for 2009

© Ellen Blonder

Here are the Surinam cherries (see November 26 post, below) laid out on what will be my 2009 Christmas card. I've layered black and white patterns that I had hand-drawn a while back, then colorized and layered them in Photoshop. The abstract background pattern is taken from a scan of peeling paint.

Vegetarian Thanksgiving

So what do you do for Thanksgiving when your family traditionally doesn't get together until Saturday, to allow family members to spend the day with other in-laws? Years ago, my side of the family bowed out of vying for Thursday, but it still feels like a day for a special meal, even though my in-law family has passed on. This year, I went vegetarian for the two of us (top photo, clockwise) with cauliflower gratin, chard timbales, chickpea-seitan cutlets with porcini mushroom gravy, and a relish made with apples, dried peaches, dried plums, and ginger. I also made a simple green salad with roasted red and yellow beets. We finished with an apple galette. Somehow, it felt Thanksgiving-y without a mashed potato, cranberry, turkey or pumpkin in sight.

Surinam Cherry-Final

© Ellen Blonder

It's hard to put something down for a month and add finishing touches. Here's the Surinam cherry painting I last posted October 19. I may turn this into my Christmas card, since we did find these in Kauai over winter.

By the way, I just found out about a great foodie dictionary and recipe resource, so if you want to find out more about Surinam cherries, check this out:

Peony Leaves

© Ellen Blonder

The peony watercolor above is something I painted a few years back. But what I really wanted to share is how much more finely someone can take shading of peony leaves. The photo below shows part of an embroidered work I saw during my recent China trip. Not only are the silk threads almost as fine as hair, the work is embroidered on a translucent rectangle of silk that hangs in a free-standing frame; the piece has a "front" on either side--no messy knots or stray threads anywhere. I was told such a piece can take three years to embroider.

Fall on the Sacred Way

photo © Ellen Blonder

I'm still trying to get back up to speed with the drawing and painting after returning from China. Meanwhile, I've been working on a personal album of photos from the trip. The photo for this page was taken alongside the Sacred Way to the Ming Tombs, a path that funerary processions took when an Emperor was to be buried.

Panda-monium

photo © Ellen Blonder

I didn't paint these. Children who were visiting the Beijing Zoo did. I love how the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Thousands of these small, hand-painted pandas were arranged on an enclosed lawn. The results were stunning.

I was in China for two weeks, and have been working on a personal photo book since I've been home. This is one of the pages. We were at the zoo to see the real pandas.