I admit, last year I went a teeeny bit crazy with my love for pumpkin. In case you missed it here is the post. (But then don’t tell me I didn’t warn you!) I blame it on …. oh jeez, I just love pumpkin! I could not live without its smell while roasting, its decorative value or that beautiful color that just makes me smile even when its dreary and gloomy outside. So now that it’s pumpkin season I took a pumpkin, sliced up the second, scraped out a bit of pulp and seeds and sat down to draw and paint this beautiful composition. And then something completely different emerged. How did a pumpkin become a beet? Beets me!

Still life with beets
Still life with beets – 1
still life with beets
Still life with beets – 2

My love for pumpkin might just be rivaled with my love for beets. I will eat it in just about every form: as juice, soup, side dish, main dish, relish or chips. Oh, and the beetroot chocolate cakes! And that color that just goes to the depth of my soul and soothes and comforts me. So no wonder when I added just a beet and then another one to the composition they overpowered my senses to the point that there is no pumpkin in sight.

I played with a couple of concepts, but ended up choosing a combination of a quick sketch, with wide deliberate strokes and angles and washes of watercolor. I used gauche and SAI watercolor pens to get the color and effect that I wanted. For the shadows I opted for graphite pencil on a wet ground instead. I felt the soft grey haze that it gave complemented the composition better than any watercolor would.  At the end I played around with the finished piece in Photoshop to give it a  Pop art-ish feel. I quite like them. I feels it is a good change and sure beets painting a pumpkin all the time. Okay, okay, I’ll stop!