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The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

book cover drawingI hope everyone is having a lovely Easter weekend, and as we say in Greek, “Christos Anesti” (Christ is risen). I’m only making quick sketches this weekend, as I’m concentrating on being with family mostly.

It seems that the library in my city caters especially to senior who love to read mystery novels. Being on an economy move lately, I’ve been going down to the library every week or so to pick up new books and I’ve been reading a lot of mysteries in particular.

I really loved The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie because the main character is an eleven year old girl and the whole thing reminded me of the sort of book I used to read when I was that age. The story takes place in the 1950’s English countryside. Flavia de Luce is a huge nerd and spends her time plotting against her two nasty older sisters and researching chemistry and various forms of poison. She ends up finding a dead body in the cucumber patch and gets herself wrapped up in a nice little murder mystery. I would recommend this book to anyone who is looking for something fun and entertaining that is not too involved or complicated. Apparently they are turning it into a series so I will definitely be wanting to read the next one.

I never did finish the drawing because I couldn’t justify using so much of my lovely green colored pencils after I caught my careless error when it was too late. I am including it here for other people’s edification. This is an example of the importance of having one’s drawing surface as straight up as possible, and double checking one’s work throughout (see the top right corner of the book). When making a drawing on a flat surface like a tabletop, this sort of issue comes up often. Everything appears correct when you are making the drawing, but once the piece is held up for normal viewing, the angles are skewed and distorted. Portraits are especially easy to mess up this way, often resulting in noses that are too long.

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