Hi everyone! This is my latest piece called The Pepperoncini Plant. I used Transon Round Goat Hair Watercolor brushes (sorry, I did not keep track of what sizes), and ShinHan Professional Watercolor paints in Vandyke Brown, Raw Umber, Sap Green, Yellow Green, and Olive Green. I bought this watercolor paint set when I was first starting out because I really did not want to deal with color mixing at the same time as learning watercolor painting. However now, my intent is to use this set until they are gone and then replace them with primary colors and mix my own. I find that the colors are close to what I want, but not exactly, and I feel I could get the colors closer to what I want if I mix them myself. Plus, I would rather do it myself than need to buy and replace 30 – 50 different color tubes! It was a bit ridiculous of me (actually, lazy) that I didn’t just jump right in to begin with as I know quite a bit about color matching (my step-father was a color-matcher his whole career). I painted on Winsor & Newton watercolor cold pressed 140 lb. 100% cotton paper. This is the first time I have tried the Winsor & Newton paper; I started on Canson XL and then transitioned to Arches. The Canson XL is super smooth; therefore, you must watch the amount of water you use closely as it does not soak and spread very easily. The Arches soaks up the water and spreads almost like a sponge, and the Winsor & Newton falls somewhere in between.
The Pepperoncini Plant was a bit random to paint and came about because of a new recipe I was trying out. As soon as I bit into the end of one a memory as bright as the green of the pepper popped into my head of me and my mother. When I was young (about seven) my mom worked at the Canyon City Liquor Store in Azusa, California. This is what is looked like back in the day
(minus the Lotto sign, it didn't exist then). The last time I was in there (early 2000's) it was pretty deserted, and it did not look like the deli was working anymore at all. The deli was where my mom worked, and it was rockin’ in the old days! I remember the lines at lunch time, stretching out the door and around the corner waiting for their pastrami or French Dip roast beef sandwiches. My mom would take these gigantic beef chunks and stuff them full of garlic cloves and other special ingredients, which were a secret recipe of Mary, who was the head of the deli back then. And off to the huge ovens they would go; the smell was so wonderful! The school bus would drop me off at the corner down the street and I would walk to the liquor store and hang out in the back room where there were large plastic barrels of pickles and bottles of pepperoncini. I would sit and do my homework (sometimes) and go run around with the neighborhood kids (most of the time) until she got off of work and we would walk home (across the parking lot, across another empty lot, and there we were).
One day Mom was eating lunch with a pepperoncini on the side. I remember how green the pepper was and how the crunch sounded so good, and I wanted some! My mom knew I would not like it (I didn’t even like mustard as a kid because it was too spicy), and so she said no. Of course, being a seven-year-old I bugged her and bugged her until she finally relented. I can still remember the way she was laughing as she handed it to me, knowing what the outcome would be. I took a tiny bite off of the small end and chewed a couple of times before I spit it out, yelling about how ‘I was gonna die’!! I don’t remember exactly what she gave me, but it was probably milk or a piece of plain bread because that seems to be my go-to even now.
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