Last month, I mentioned taping down a couple of pieces of watercolour paper so I could work on them without the paper buckling under the water load. Here is where I have got to with one of them:

The painting was inspired by the colours I saw when frying up some of one of our last tomato crops of the season – fruit in various stages of ripeness along with some red onion. You can see the original photo I took and my initial sketch on Flickr. I think the image is almost there. I like the contrast of the colourful fruit with the dark background and how the introduction of some dark blues (on the opposite side of the colour wheel from all those greens, yellows, oranges and reds) creates an effect a bit like stained glass. On the painting side, I might see if I can pull back some brighter highlights in the tomatoes but, otherwise, I think I’m done.

However, there is the question of how to cut it away from the frame. Here is a digital mock-up of simply cutting the frame away (I had to distort it a bit to cope with the angle of the original image):

I feel that it looses some of its energy by dropping the continuation of the strong curves over the boundary. If repainting, I’d definitely consider making this a feature of the overall design. For now though, I’m still pondering whether to cut out the picture (perhaps painting some overlaid boundaries similar to the one you can see on the bottom right, where my digital cropping was a bit hasty) or to present the tape as part of the final image.