We inherited our house from my husband's grandmother. It was built in 1903 and it has been in his family since shortly thereafter. It's not anything too grand, but it's solid as a rock and it's all the house we need. In the back yard of our fine old house is a fine old apple tree. It's either a second or third generation grown from a cutting off predecessors that had to be cut down. The apples are mostly green and a little too tart to eat right from the tree, but fantastic for cooking. Granny always called the apples "Maiden's Blush", named for the slight pink tinge they tend to get on the side that gets the most sun. The tree produces so many that we are never able to use even a fraction of them. All summer long our yard smells of fermenting apples and the bees fly around drunk.
This was the inspiration for my latest painting. In the Painter program, I started out with the broad watercolor brush but wasn't crazy about how it was going, so I switched to the new simple watercolor brush. It worked much better for what I was trying to achieve. It has a nice grainy quality that gave the apple a more realistic texture. To be honest, I reached a point when I wasn't sure it was identifiable as an apple - more like a yellowish-green blob. That's when I added the little stem. I think it helped. I've added the finished yellowish-green blob with a stem to several Zazzle items. :-)
