I know it's hard to believe but sometimes we don't finish a bottle of wine with dinner and the dregs are left for the next day. Often these end up as an ingredient but today I rescued them with the thought that they could be added to my growing collection of pictures instead. There's something very attractive, and almost organic, about glass bottles and this one is no exception:
Unlike previous efforts with this sketch I felt compelled to add a simple, light-grey wash to the bottle in order to contrast with my hatched shading (all in pencil). Without this I felt that the picture would lack presence. Then I realised that really I should make full use of my watercolour set and mix up tones for the entire piece - which is how I came to be carefully edging light green around my otherwise unshaded labels while continuing it down over the wine inside (since its colour would filter through the glass). Actually with the wine I ended up applying three separate colours: a base green, dark red on top of this and finally a grey wash to further deepen the tone:
While the resulting colour isn't quite dark enough it's pretty close and much richer than either the glass or the metal lid. What I particularly like are the well-defined boundaries between the different colours; fairly often my watercolours blend together but here I waited patiently for the different parts to dry and focused intently on my brush-stroke while working at the edges. As a result the colours work well and perhaps distract from the fact that the bottle is somewhat more squashed than it should be!