Wandering around London’s bustling Borough Market is always a visual joy. There is so much to take in and I especially love the way the fresh produce is displayed in groups, with jostling colours, shapes and textures.
I was very drawn to the bright red strawberries in little piles, nestled in boxes with crisp shiny highlights. After a couple of weeks this formed the basis of an idea for a new painting. I wanted to capture the feeling of how I saw the strawberries, everything around them disappears and they become their own little world or landscape.
Below are some of my composition ideas, I didn’t like the box as it felt to contained and much preferred arranging them gently grouped together so there were gaps as well areas where they were pressing against each other.
I also tried mark making whilst eating strawberries, trying to represent taste and texture. It’s an interesting exercise to do and I found responding to the texture slightly easier than trying to represent taste. Still need more practice and I hoping that it will develop to inform my working drawing before painting.
For this piece I created a tonal drawing, working from a photograph and scaling it to a larger size. I used more expressive marks than previous work as I wanted to capture the character of the berries rather than every tiny detail of the seeds and highlights.
After tracing some of the main shapes I printed them on to stretched watercolour paper using the blotted line technique with a dip pen and acrylic ink. Once the ink is dry I use masking fluid to block out the highlights then build up layers of watercolour washes.
There were quite a few attempts at this piece, things went wrong technically - masked out areas didn’t work, colours weren’t right and I over worked it, losing the luminosity of the paint. I nearly gave up, but after a few months and a fresh pair of eyes I began again and things went to plan.
I chose the title Strawbs for this painting as it’s the shortened version of strawberries that my parents have always used and it conjures up fond memories of summer.
Signed Giclee prints of Strawbs are available here.
Strawbs
Watercolour and Ink
Lucy Clayton
