Contour Tomatoes on the Vine

 

This is my first entry in Margarets Celebration of a Garden-themed altered book. It's also the first time I've used a watercolor ground--the pages of the book were slick.  For this experiment, I coated the pages with Golden gesso (probably not necessary), the added several coats of Golden Absorbent Ground. I allowed a lot of drying time between each coat, which slowed this project down considerably, but it was well worth it. Upon painting, I found that the ground bleeds somewhat when juicy watercolor is applied, but so did the Daniel Smith brand.
 This spread has three continuous line contours based on the same bunch of tomatoes, using three different tools: red colored pencil, black tombow marker, and a pencil.   The tomatoes were gone by the time I painted the shadows on the last bunch, so I faked it and it shows--that's the problem with using a prop that my husband wants to eat!  This is in the Color-Texture-Pattern section of Margaret's book, so I wrote a haiku to follow the color aspect:
Luscious tomatoes
bright color in the garden
even the green worms!