Bakery Bless

Yes, I meant to say "Bless" not "Bliss." There are times when you just need to paint something you love, and this was one of those times. I've made it no secret that out local bakery, De Azucar has blessed me by allowing me to put my art in their bakery since they opened their doors in January of 2013. The owner, Angie Lopez, and I have become friends. I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to see her intentionally support other local businesses besides myself. Because of her family's hard work and dedication to our community, I wanted to give them a special thank-you gift. Their Bakery's 3 year anniversary seemed like the right occassion.

Since I know so many of us love to see the process of how things are made, I wanted to share the steps I took to complete this piece.

I started by penciling in the bakery cases, workers, customers and furniture. I knew that I wanted my focal point to be the pastries themselves so I took the most time in that part of the sketch.

I used a mixture of looking at online images of people and using my poseable figure for positioning the people. This part always takes me the longest as for years I made the mistake of avoiding drawing people…so now it stretches me.

The yellow is where I masked off some of the areas that I wanted to protect when painting. This allows me to not have to be so careful when painting in the backgrounds and surrounding areas. It's an easy way of preserving some whites.

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I did underpaintings first of various areas of color and decided that in this case I wanted to leave the less detailed, softer areas of the painting for last.

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I work messy, what can I say?

Here it is finished. I like the welcoming look of the piece as if you could just walk on in the door with the sunshine.

In hindsight, one thing I would change is that I would have liked to put some groupings of figures at a table. It is a local spot that certainly is full of friends meeting together for coffee. Wishing I would have depicted that social aspect better.

I certainly learn with each piece I create. Not rushing the planning stage is my take away today. I'm thinking this applies to much more than painting!

Thank you so much for reading. I hope you have a beautiful day.

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