Assignment one

Man Made Still Life

I began by putting some objects together and firstly I drew three compositions to decide which one I would chose and also whether I would chose landscape or a portrait drawing.  I also drew some of the individual components so I was more familiar with them.

I then played about with colour to try and decide what medium I would use to apply colour to the finished drawing.

I  tried coloured pencils which were effective but because of the size of the A2 paper I thought that pastels would cover better.  I then tried to draw a charcoal landscape format on A2 just to make sure that portrait was the way to go.

I definitely then decided portrait was the format to choose.  From here I decided to draw on A3 paper a pastel preliminary drawing.

It was a disaster!  I concentrated so much on the objects I lost sight of the rest of the picture and I made up the background, even worse mistake.  The table is floating in the air and the background colour awful.  I was going to throw the lot away and start again and after thinking about this I had to rethink how I would tackle the problems so I just committed to A2 for the final piece.

The table I feel should have been placed further up in the picture as the two front legs of the table drop out of the drawing and then there would have been less background to fill as I think there is too much dressing gown shown. 

The second part of the Assignment a still life with natural objects I began in the same way playing about with the fruit visually and then drawing them in pencil and deciding on the composition.

I then drew the fruit and played about with colour and used coloured pencils to start with and this time I was also thinking about the background which was kitchen tiles.  I tried conte-crayon dragging the stick sideways over the paper and it worked. 

 I next tried pastel pencils, soft pastel and oil pastel and liked the effect.  I tried outlining the fruit with black oil pastel and this reminded me of Patrick Caulfield usage of black line so I thought I would give it a go.

I then did a quick drawing in charcoal so I could get a general idea of how it would look.

I decided to do my preliminary drawing in A3 in coloured pencils and use the conte-crayon for the tiles on the back wall.  I did not like the effect but perhaps it didn't combine  well with coloured pencils.

It was hard to get a shadow on top of the conte-crayon and in hindsight I should have tried hatching.  Anyway I decided to not use the conte-crayon in the final picture and chose pastel.

I am not too pleased with the background as it fights with the foreground.  I used the oil pastel to outline the fruit and I think that I shouldn't of outlined everything.  I feel that I have lost tone and form in the pineapple and I should have put in more shading.  Before I started the background the box was uncoloured and initially I wanted to leave it white as it looked effective seeing the coloured fruit through it.  I should have left it white and decided when the picture was finished whether it worked or not.  The completed picture was drawn on soft grey pastel mat and I used pastel pencil, soft and ultra soft pastel, black oil pastel, coloured pencil (on the orange peel) and black crayon.