End of Eggshells

That's it folks - I decided to go the whole hog, seeing it had gone a bit haywire anyway, and paint in the decorative edge of the plate, which I did quite quickly with dots and dashes, though it may look painfully intricate (and pretty skew)! Thanks for all your encouragement - I do think I learnt a lot - but realise I have much more to learn about reflections and shadows, and that Andrew Wyeth was right, as Sandy Maudlin told in a comment, that eggs and ears probably are the hardest things to paint. I went to a watercolor workshop once, where our homework was to paint an egg, a bone and a rock, and I thought I had it taped - the secret, I told anyone who admired my egg, was not to draw a pencil outline first, but to use the brush edge to swoop around the egg shape - well, let's just say there's more to it than that...

[In the middle of this project, I puzzled over why my 'still-life' looked so different to what I had on the paper - then it dawned on me that one of our resident cooks had deposited a few more eggshells on the plate, probably thinking crazy mother was just collecting them for some other arty pursuit (I've been painting in the kitchen, being the warmest room in the house right now.) Ha ha ha!]