I am starting to lose sleep at night over these projects, so I resolved to try something I thought would be a snap. A simple still life was the theme of this week. I have lights, I have honeycombs and snoots. I’ve never done still life, but I’ve lit portraits. As with the other projects, the results were not what I had anticipated. I had visions of Renaissance paintings, with fruit, silver wine goblets and loaves of bread all surrounded by dark shadows and the warm golden glow of candlelight. No matter what I did, there was just too much light and not enough contrast. Out of desperation I turned off all of the lights, covered my living room with black velvet and decided to paint the light I wanted into the scene with a flash light. I’ve never done this before but the results were a little closer to what I was looking for. I’ll have to try this again sometime when I have more time.