Study in Mushrooms: Watercolor

I don't know which is more fun-cooking the mushrooms, eating them, or painting them! This dish was from over the weekend (see older posts) but I did the painting last night. I am enjoying the immediacy of watercolors again and had a lot of fun blending the colors for the cast iron skillet.

Have you ever noticed that black is never really black? There is a multitude of shadings all along the color spectrum from indigo blue to a russety deep brown and of course various saturations of color to take advantage of the white of the paper. One thing about working with whites-in a watercolor, they make the painted areas around them really "pop" so it's critical to save a great deal of the white wherever you want sparkle and movement.

Speaking of movement, I had fun washing in the background color in a concentric circle around the shape of the pan. Our stovetop is a shiny black glass which bounces a lot of light around, so getting (again) the sense of light and the fun colors from the reflective surface made it an interesting piece to do.