East meets West

Recently someone gave me a gift of a Nespresso coffee machine. The Nespresso set-up is a real marketing success - sleek presentation, neat pods, great accessories - and the coffee's good too!
Somewhere in the studio I had saved a brass Arabic coffee pot or "dalla"; I thought the modern pods and the dalla might make a nice combination.

The paper is my favourite Clairefontaine Pastelmat, in a sort of mouse grey shade. I decided to do a colourful underpainting based on a posterized photograph of the set-up.

In the picture on the right I have started to work on the lid. I used mainly CarbOthello  pencils in shades of ochre and brown, and put a dark outline around the "spire" in order to get a real idea of the contrast.

The lid is finished and I have moved down into the body of the dalla. This is where the softer Sennelier pastels come into play.

The pot is finished and there are some surprising colours in it, including a pale lilac running down the right edge - a little in the lid, more in the curves of the concave to convex area.

The pods have been started off too.
They need to be finessed, the bottoms made more rounded, the foil tops tightened, especially at the edges. This is the point at which the pastel pencils are impractical, as working had over soft is tricky and some pencils just won't take. (I can't wait to try out the new range from Caran d'Ache - they are meant to be easily grabbed even at this late stage of the painting.)