Mint Candy: Pastels

Here I attempted to capture a hard candy in a wrapper. I do not like this piece at all. It looks very flat and the wrapper blends in with the candy. I do like the ends of the wrappers because of how simple they are, but I still think they get the idea of a wrapper across.

Egg Drawing: Pastels

For this drawing I used cool colors to capture the various shadows and highlights to make the eggs look three dimensional. I think that the shadows were extremely successful containing a good range of values, smooth transitions, and soft edges. My eggs, however, aren't as smooth and clean as I would have hoped. I believe I over blended the eggs initially so that when I tried to go back and add more color it didn't blend very well.

Dum Dum

Except for the shadow, which I did in a different place and was trying to recreate from memory, I really like how this piece turned out. I chose the mystery lollipop and worked with cool colors. This was my first time using Prismas and I learned how to layer them to create depth to a piece and how to create values using colors. I am really happy with how I used my values, and I think it looks like it is actually 3-D. I am still struggling to get around the horrendous shadow, however.

(By the way, I tried posting a picture of my drawing to the blog but it won't work, I'm not sure why. Sorry!)

Still Life

1) The lines are very smooth and precise and for the most part-save the flower- the shading is done fairly well showing a great range of values. 

2) I believe, from what I presently have of course, that my shadows and shading are very accurate. I took great pains to try to be as precise as I could following the shadows cast in life. 

3) There is a clear source of lighting. This can be most presently seem on the sock monkey's leg where you can distinclty see that the light is coming from above. 

4) The compositional sketches were very important because they showed me that I was thinking too small and I needed to widen my perspective. However, this overwhelmed me a great deal and made the project a bit more stressful and time consuming than I had hoped.

5) My final drawing is not successful because I did not succeed in finishing. I do like how the proportions are as well as the shadows look.

6) I do believe the proportions are correct. That is what I focused on for a very long time. However, the leaves are not quite accurate both in size and position, so structurally it isn't quite correct, but the rest of it is sound.

7) Surprisingly, I do believe this piece's placement is very pleasing. There are a lot of different types of objects in it that span the entire page and create an interesting and unique perspective.

8) My center of interest was definitely the lantern. I think it was well located because it is at the forefront of the piece, it is the biggest, and it is on the left where our eyes tend to go to first since we read right to left.

9) I did not manage time well at all. I got caught up on making my proportions correct that I ran out of time to add in the rest of the details which I am greatly disappointed in.

I need to get something basic down quickly and work faster next time.

10) I struggled with the lunch box's proportions greatly. I had to keep looking at the real life set and redrawing it on my page until it was satisfactory. 

11) I have learned that in drawing a still life, proportions and shadows are extremely important in creating a life-like piece. 

Progression Of A chocolate Bar

1) Value is extremely important in any real-life drawing because that is what gives your piece value and depth which makes it more realistic. 

2) Since I did not finish this all at one time, each time I retrieved my chocolate bar it looked different having new creases and shadows. I tried to draw the outlines if everything for each panel the first day so that I wouldn't have to deal with new highlights and darks.

3) It was very important to me to have clean, crisp edges for my wrapper because the wrapper in real life had very defined edges and I wante d my drawing to look as much like the real thing as I could make it.

4) My interpretation of texture, a smooth bar and a crinkled wrapper, guided how I went about drawing my piece. I worked to create smooth, albeit not always very successfully, transitions in value in the bar itself and quick, defined transitions in the wrapper. Without the differentiation, it would be difficult to tell the two aspects of the piece apart 

5) If I could draw this differently, I would push the darks more, create more defined creases, and create ever smoother and more crinkled textures where they apply. I learned that you must use your values carefully to capture the 3 dimensional part of the piece and create smooth transitions to have a cohesive drawing. 

Shading shapes

Here I started learning the basics of how to use a light source to give objects depth and make them seem three dimensional.  I need to make sure to use all of my values; use really light lights and really dark darks with soft and subtle transitions in-between.