Still Life: fun with fonts

With the weather continuing to deteriorate, its time for more still life paintings I can do indoors. Its actually not my favorite thing to do, I would rather be out on location, but the results have been decent, and maybe I can do something with it. Certainly it builds up skills, and provides different challenges. In these examples, I grabbed books off the shelf with interesting fonts. The first example is a cook book, it says L'Art de la Cuisine in full. Getting the flowing orange letters against a dark purple background was tricky. You can't over-paint bright orange on top of dark purple in watercolour. 

L'Art de, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, December 2025 

Here is part of the cover of an old aquarium fish book from the late 1950's perhaps. The cover said 32 pages in colour, which must have been a big selling point back then. You can see from the painting I did, they used yellow, cyan, black and magenta. The green is printed with small yellow and blue dots closely spaced. The book actually (surprisingly) mentioned that you can put LSD in the fish tank to enhance the colours of the guppies, but I have a feeling the LSD was meant for the aquarium owner to take so as to enhance the colour of the guppies. 

In colour, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, December 2025 

I got a nice book on Hiroshige's series of famous places, it is printed on a very long piece of paper folded up like an accordion and bound in a hardcover, so you kind of unfold it as you read. Its an old-fashioned concept, but done in modern times. The cover has a shimmering blue weave with a silvery decal printed and Japanese symbols which I did my best to copy accurately. I took a Chinese art and calligraphy course as a young(er) man, so that came in handy here even though its Japanese. 

Hiroshige, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, December 2025 

Finally, this is taken from a cardboard packaging for Lindt chocolate, and I copied a few other interesting fonts, ISBN, and q code in the background. After we eat the chocolate which doesn't take long, I use the package to hold my brushes upright in my painting kit, this prevents the brushes from falling down to the bottom which can be very difficult to recover in the winter on location. Plus it gives us an excuse to buy more chocolate.  

Lindt, watercolour 4 x 7.5" cold press, December 2025