Salty Sponge Cake Painting

You have two choices. You can either clean or paint. Which would you pick? This past Sunday I did a little of both. I got the painting finished, and my freezer is almost all cleaned.

Here was the creative process:

1. Come up with an idea. It’s time for the latest KCC, a blog carnival overseen by this creative cook, and I want to submit my sponge cake recipe. But whenever I submit a recipe, I photograph it. I only make sponge cake on Passover. Who has the patience to separate all those eggs the rest of the year? So I decided it would be easier to paint a sponge cake (this is how my mind works).
2. Fine tune the idea and find a method. I email Jill: how do I do that salting watercolor technique again? We end up with a lovely post and include a painting by Jill sort of like a Van Gogh, that I call “Salty Night.”
3. Make some sketches.
   This was my first sketch:
   My husband said it looked like a cake. But on the other hand, he said, one might mistake it for a hat. Sort of like the famous drawing by the narrator of the Little Prince, I said.
4. Second sketch: I go to Google image and look up sponge cake. I’m inspired to draw this sketch:
   
   Can’t mistake this one for a hat. The cake plate helps, too.
5. Set up my space: I print Jill’s email with the salting watercolor directions, tape the watercolor paper unto a piece of masonite, and draw a final sketch. I purposely placed the subject matter slightly to the left, instead of in the center, to increase interest. Note in this photo how I put in arrow to show the direction of light. I later erased the arrow.
6. Wet the area. One usually starts a watercolor by wetting the area that you want to paint.
7. Apply the salt and paint. And I painted. I made one side a little darker. I added bits of alizarin crimson to my shadows, for fun. My son says it looks like mabul cake (you have to know both English and Hebrew to get this joke: mabul means flood and sometimes I make mabul cake for Parshat Noach, you know, the one with the flood). My husband says it looks like pound cake. OK, I’ll take that.
8. Review the painting. Did the salt technique work? I brought it over to Jill this morning. We agree that the painting worked over all, but the salting works better with: 1) more paint 2) darker colors 3) larger area.

Stay tuned for my sponge cake recipe. Coming soon. At least, before April 7.