Decorative gourd season

I don't know if you're aware, but it's decorative gourd season. There's a pretty famous essay about it, in point of fact^[1]. I am quite fond of decorative gourds, pumpkins especially, and threatened to spend my bonus this year on pumpkins to lavishly decorate the stairs and front porch, though after I did the calculations, it became clear that one, if I spent entire bonus on pumpkins it would be more pumpkins than would fit there, two if I attempted to fit them anyway, they would likely crush and destroy the stairs, and three, then I would need to somehow earn another, substantially larger bonus to cover the costs of repairing the stairs. So, I decided to express my passion for decorative gourd season in a more measured and practical way. I took a watercolor class about painting gourds and stuff. I also bought some modestly sized decorative gourds to use as my subjects.

In the class, the instructor walked us through painting several different kinds of gourds and seasonal produce. It was an online class, so although she had the items in front of her, I suppose I was painting more from reference. As I worked on it, I didn't think my painting was particularly good and I especially didn't like the technique of using white gauche instead of preserving white space to represent light bits. After it dried, I liked it better, though I still didn't like the parts with gauche as much as the parts where I just left it blank.

In the days following the class, I painted several other gourds. This time, I painted from life, though I used the same technique of assembling the still life objects on the paper rather than by putting together a whole composition and painting them all. I skipped the gauche, too. I'm sure there's ways of painting with it that look good, but I think it's actually harder as a beginner to get gauche right than preserving white space.

I was going to paint more objects around this fantastically textured pumpkin. That was the plan. Then, as I thought of how I might arrange other gourds, I realized it would look better as it was with plenty of blank space around it so it could breathe, as it were. That's an ongoing lesson in watercolor painting. Don't overwork it, which mostly means don't keep messing with it and adding more detail. But I think it's also good to leave of blank space.

For this one, I gathered some pretty weird objects. The thing that looks like a bizarre pine cone is I guess a magnolia pinecone, or seedpod, or whatever. These strange objects fall from magnolias and I love how complex and fuzzy they are. I'm also mildly obsessed with buckeyes and fill my pockets with them every fall, so of course I had to try painting them. In this painting I decided to try some shadows to give the objects a little dimension.

Now I have a shelf full of gourds and paintings of gourds, and a technique for painting still lives, which will be a very nice thing to do during the rainy season and when the days are short so I can't go out and paint outside.