Drawing Fruit and Vegetables in Colour

The next exercise requested drawing some individual fruits and vegetables in colour using cross hatching.  This was again tricky as it was quite hard to get the tones right as all fruits and vegetables are either curved, lumpy, irregular and have textured surfaces. I try to use natural light but sometimes on a dull day it doesn't help determining the tone.  I chose to use coloured pencils but found that it was difficult to build up tone and I think that I should have put on more areas on colour to give more depth to them.

The second part of the exercise was to arrange a group still life and again use hatching as a technique to indicate tone.  I again chose to use colour pencils but the same problem occured that the tones were not deep enough.  It isn't the type of medium used but the fact that I didn't work into the tones enough.

The next exercise was setting up a group on still life using felt tips dipping pens and coloured inks.  This was much bolder and more immediate I enjoyed the freedom of making a decision and with inks you have to live with it, I should have experiemented more and used splattering.

The last exercise in this section was the use of oil pastels which I found to be very difficult.  The exercise was to cross hatch the colour on in layers allowing some paper to show through.  The oil pastels I used were sennelier pastels which are very soft and as I was doing this exercise during some of our hottest days I was struggling with controlling the medium as it was melting in the heat, I resorted to putting them in the freezer so that I could get some control.  I think that this medium for me had to be the most challenging.  Fruit and vegetables are great subjects to draw owing to their different textures and shape and state of ripeness alters colours and tone.  The difficulty I found with oil pastels is the difficulty of getting detail with this medium and perhaps I shouldn't have strived to achieve detail and left it more freer.