Still Life with summer dress

I've had quite a bit of work (as in earning money) lately so finding it hard to get time for painting. So I set up a slower painting that I could do an hour here and there during the week. My mission was to find a more interesting background and for lack of patterned piece of material I grabbed a dress out of my wardrobe. Well, I think I failed at capturing the pattern on the dress, but I'm pretty happy with the eggs!

Mum's egg cup with eggs

This is a study of eggs, which were rather more difficult than I expected. Half the problem is, if it isn't the right shape, it doesn't look like an egg. The egg cup is one that mum painted years ago in a ceramics class. It's very cute! I would have liked this looser, but anyway, it's 'brush mileage' as my drawing teacher would say...

Mexican Sunflower

I was told once that this flower is called a Mexican Sunflower. Not sure if that's actually the case but anyway, when they are in full bloom they look very bright and happy. There's a bunch of them growing down by the lake near here and I picked one of the last ones of the season yesterday morning. It was looking a little tired this morning but I decided to go ahead and paint it anyway. Half way through mixing the colours I suddenly noticed it was starting to droop alarmingly. So I quickly put colour here there and everywhere. The yellow would stick to the canvas properly (cheap student paints!) and it all seemed to be a bit out of control. Well anyway, here it is...