Art Deco Strainer

                                                    Acrylic on board 5" x 7"
I painted this today in two sittings - 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the afternoon.  It was 6.30pm when I finished, so the photo was taken at dusk and probably hasn't done justice to the colours, but I was too impatient to wait until morning.
I set these items up right in front of my easel to get the view I wanted, hoping all the while that I wouldn't get paint on the fabric. Thankfully I didn't! I also painted "Christmas Baubles" from life as I find it takes so long to try to get a good photo of the subject.  Also the colours end up too far from the originals.  It is far more satisfying painting from life even though it is harder to keep the exact angle that you begin with.

 I hadn't originally begun with a top view like this.  It was slightly on an angle so I took care to make sure the plate wasn't exactly round. Then I discovered that I had painted the strainer from a top view and suddenly the plate looked like it had a flat bottom.  I tried to change the strainer to have the same perspective, but it didn't save the plate, so in the end I made the plate a little rounder.  Now I see that I forgot to change the shine on the strainer back to what I had originally.   However, it wasn't precise enough in the first place to get too precious about its faults at this late stage.