Lemon a day

   size 6 in x 12 in 15cm x 30cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper

These are the last of the early apples they have turned yellow and shiny red. I think they are past their best in terms of eating but the next tree is ready so that doesn’t matter. They are very pretty for a painting however. It’s a pretty rough and ready painting but I like the colours.

There was a mini apple day today at the back of the Mayflower pub, this all went very well as a mixture of people came to look and try the apples and juice. The organisers were not allowed to use fruit from the community orchard site as the council have not yet tested it ….for landfill contamination. As the apples are growing on what was a farm (according to some) and next to a nature reserve this seems quite farfetched.

I started this sketch in between helping set up a juice maker and the official opening time. Trying to juice apples with a press but no apple crusher was hard going, I did improve our yield by half freezing and then defrosting some ripe fruit and cutting it up.

There are still ceps to be found but the cold nights are going to discourage them. I am bored with the same old wood and want to go and check some different places. That’s not to say that I don’t get a thrill when I see a neat and prim baby cep sitting in the moss where there was nothing yesterday. When they are young they are very upright and straight-laced, as they age they get more wild and blowsy…no parallels there then. I have been watching a round ball slowly emerge from the woodland floor by a path, I had decided that it was not likely to be a cep, now it has sprung up and it stinks. See the photo below, the stinkhorn- it does what it says on the can.

#129 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog