I had a lot of fun playing around with a new media today.  Since I’ve noticed a lot of pears showing up in my work, I bought a bunch of fresh pears at the grocery store last night.  I thought it might inspire me.    Add the pears with several brand new bottles of brightly colored ink that have been awaiting the right day, and the inspiration was born!

Here’s one of the first sketches I made with charcoal.  I added color  with the ink, diluting it like watercolor.  Once it was dry, I used oil pastels, and later chalk pastels to outline, highlight, shade and add definition.

After doing a few of these, I started to loosen up a bit. I kept the washes pretty light and loose, adding salt for texture.  Here are some of the looser ones.

I have to include these two (below) because they made me laugh.  Some of the ink took quite a long time to dry, and when I moved the paper, the ink ran.  I knew that would happen, but I just wanted to play around and see what came of it.   The pears grew appendages.

When my daughter got home from school, she saw my “models” (to use her terminology) on the table.  She, too, thought they looked a lot like people.  She had an acorn and put it on the stem of one of the pears, telling me to make it look like a head.  So here’s the result of our creative collaboration.

These are all relatively small, done on 9 x 12″ watercolor paper.