Italian eggplant, seashell, nail polish bottle
(4B pencil on bristol board; 9x12”)
Not the most natural collection of items. The eggplant is just so beautiful that I haven’t had the heart to eat it just yet. The nail polish was a slate blue color that provided a nice foil for the purple vegetable - would have made (might still make?) a good watercolor.
Cup, glass teapot
Derwent colored drawing pencil on bristol board; 9x12.” Meh, as they say … .
Knife, garlic, onion
(charcoal; 9x12”)
Orange, pear (pencil and charcoal on butcher-style paper; 9x12”)
Paid a little more attention to the shading, while experimenting with charcoal (vine) to get a more effective range of tones. Pleased.
Water pitcher (pencil on notepad; approx. 6x8”)
Continued my drawing studies at a recent conference. The spout and the handle would have been almost impossible for me to capture accurately prior to using the techniques shown in the Aristides book — there’s room for improved accuracy, but given that I was also listening to presenters, I’m pretty happy with the outcome.
Two Strawberries, Orange (4B pencil on bristol paper; 9x12”)
The strawberries are crap, but I’m pleased with the top of the orange.
Pear & mug (4b pencil on bristol paper; 9x12”)
Pear, Grapefruit, Mango (B pencil on Bristol; 9x12”)
While I’ve done some shading here, I was mostly working on picture structure, placement, and accuracy; the shading is really only rudimentary at this point, I’ll be focusing on that more later.
Lemon, pear, lime (pencil on butcher-style paper; 9x12”)
Even though I intended to do more drawing of faces, and even though I’ve been drawing a lot of figures lately, my next several (6 - and counting?) are actually still life.
As I was thinking about the complex drawing of figures and portraits, I realized I don’t have the technical skills I feel I need to really drive my drawings forward. I’ve always been intrigued by the competence that classically-trained artists have, and so picked up a copy of the relatively new book by Juliette Aristides, Lesson in Classical Drawing.
What an eye opener! The ideas about structuring drawings, of siting and measuring, are all new to me — I was a typical “start in one corner and draw around until it’s ‘sorta’ close” drawer. I set myself the task of doing some basic still life pictures to test the ideas, grow more comfortable with them, and see if that produced results (I should state for the record that I’m only about 1/3 of the way through the book, so I have a lot to digest moving forward).
In any case, while this first picture shows some promise from my perspective (certainly creating accuracy was much easier following the ideas in the book), the succeeding drawings that I’ll be posting show some pretty quick and solid improvement.
Art and/in process
