A bad day for Ratatouille...

I'm off work this week so am trying to have a major push on coursework. Last Saturday I dashed to the shops and selected the week's fruit and veg on the basis of how interesting it was to draw, came home and immediately set up a collection of veg to work on.

Pretty soon I realised it was not going to be a good day. I couldn't get comfortable, moved the easel position several times, and squinted in vain to see why the left hand side of my study didn't match up. The first failed attempt is above- I decided I had put too much in so removed a few things and tried again.

As you can see I got even less far with this attempt, again due to an inability to reconcile the respective placement of the foreshortened aubergine, garlic and knife handle. My husband intervened at this point to forcibly remove me from the studio (the air had taken on a blue tone) and feed me with bacon sarnies and coffee, at which point I realised that with the sheer amount of hours I'd been working, I should have really taken the weekend off for some R&R before diving in.

However, as I needed some of the veg for dinner, I had to dive back in later, so chose to use my favourite charcoal and eraser technique in an attempt to get past the block.

It's not perfect and I was grateful for some candid feedback from a co-student after I posted it on the forums, but at least I felt I had beaten the jinx.

Valid points raised were errors in the shadows, not defining the back edge of the board, and the enormous negative space left at the top- which I would have trimmed off when mounting. Also I still had a diagonal void between the upper left and lower right halves; the tomatoes intersected with the tip of the marrow and were higher up the board (which is why I hadn't seen the back of the board).

However, even bad things can be learnt from and as this is the first really low point I've hit on the course it probably shows I have a good level of motivation- I'm certainly not going to be beaten by a few pesky veg!