ONLINE ART COURSE – COLOURED PENCILS – VEGETABLES

I have now reached the final module in the online art course which deals with specific media, in this case, coloured pencils. The remaining modules are subject-based (e.g. landscapes, animals, portraits).

Coloured pencils are now one of my favourite media to work with. I have not been doing this for long and still have a lot to learn but it is incredible the results one can obtain from them. See my drawing of my hubby’s friend’s cat for one of my first efforts.

Vegetables

Phil, the teacher of the course, prefers a loose, sketchy style. I am not so keen on this. When I first saw the subject of the first project in the module, and his completed drawing, I didn’t think I would enjoy doing it. However, I decided to persevere, and if necessary, follow his instructions to the letter whether I liked it or not. Once I started, I realised that I was going to enjoy this project very much indeed. I did decide, though, to make my drawing more detailed and less sketchy, because this is what I feel comfortable with, and I already have a little experience of working with coloured pencils under my belt and felt confident to create a more realistic result.

After an initial instructional video with advice on how to set up your own still life with the best composition for a good finished art work, we began the project proper. As always, to start with, we did a basic pencil sketch, this time using the grey coloured pencil from the set. Phil is using, and has recommended the Faber Castell Polychromos, and I recently bought the 24-set of these oil-based, fairly hard coloured pencils. This is the first time I have put them to use. You can certainly get a lot of fine detail with them.

Here is my initial sketch. This time I was able to plot this out without the aid of my proportional dividers and for the most part, I managed to get the placement of the various vegetables pretty much as they should be, with a little adjustment.

Mushroom

The lessons after this each concentrated on a single vegetable, adding some shading where necessary. This would be completed at the end of the project. The first vegetable we drew was the mushroom, which is really the focal point of the composition.

When you examine the reference photo with a view to drawing accurately, it is surprising (especially when it is pointed out by Phil!) how much detail you notice, which you would ignore on a superficial glance. After all, we all know what a mushroom looks like, don’t we? Well, perhaps not.

The most important thing this course is teaching me is observation.

Here’s a close-up of my mushroom.

One thing Phil pointed out was the reflected colour underneath, from the corn cob on which the mushroom is sitting. I didn’t notice initially that there was any yellow in the picture at all. We learn how to see things as they actually are, and not filtered by our pesky brains which try to convince us that we know what an object should look like! When we draw from this preconception, our drawing does not look lifelike, but often flat and strange. I also noticed how the gills on the underside have a double curve, and this is indicated by the direction of the individual pencil strokes. Another thing I have learnt throughout the course so far is how to accentuate the darker values. I was never brave enough to so this before, and when you do, the whole thing springs to life in 3-D. Under the curve of the outer cap on the left of the drawing, for instance, this is black. Since I began to learn about values, my drawing skills have improved a great deal.

Corn cob

The second vegetable we drew was the corn. This was surprisingly easy to do and I really enjoyed this one as well.

It looks a bit strange at the moment, with the mushroom sitting on the corn cob, floating in mid air! Here’s a close-up.

The highlights and shading give the cob a 3-D appearance, and taking care to vary the shape of each grain adds a touch of realism. The highlights are created by initially colouring down the centre of each row of grains with a pale yellow pencil. This colour is left exposed as you add shading around the individual grains. Amazing how shiny this makes them look. A lot of colouring with this medium seems to be more about omission than actual colouring! It’s very interesting to do, and sometimes quite a challenge.

Carrots

I really loved doing these. As you can see, I have added some very dark shadows. These will be completed as the drawing is finished.

On Phil’s drawing, he did not add as much detail, and omitted the little hairy roots on the tips of some of the carrots. I wanted to add these, and carefully shaded around each one so that only the initial highlight layer (yellow) remained. This is not an easy way to draw fine hairs, and probably not the best way; people have different methods for things like animals’ whiskers, for instance by indenting the paper with a fine embossing tool before beginning the drawing, so that the pencil skates across the indentation without adding any colour. This takes a lot of initial planning, though, and you can’t make a mistake because you can’t “un-indent” the paper. Other people remove colour afterwards, carefully scraping with a knife. You can also add more colour in the form of a white pencil but this doesn’t always show up very well – the best white coloured pencils are reputed to be Caran D’Ache Luminance, and I have just bought three of these but haven’t had a chance to try them out yet. They are extremely opaque and hold a good fine point. These pencils are top of the range and expensive, and I don’t think I shall be investing in a whole set any time soon, but they are available open stock so you can buy individual colours. The final method, which I used on the Persian cat drawing, is to paint them on afterwards with a very fine brush and opaque white paint, either gouache or acrylic. I used Dr. Ph. Martin’s Bleed Proof White, which is fabulous for highlights. It’s very thick and can be diluted without losing opacity; people dilute it to ink consistency for calligraphy work, for instance. You can also use white gel pens but people say these are not archival and may yellow with time, or flake off.

Cauliflower

This was the most difficult to draw so far, at least for me. I think I made a reasonable fist at it, though.

There was a lot of quite fussy detail, particularly in the leaves, whose veins are lighter than the rest of the leaf, requiring, again, drawing between them. All good practice! People often use the scribing method to draw leaf veins, or paint them on afterwards. It is very difficult to add lighter colours on top of dark colours with coloured pencils.

My mushroom and corn are now looking a lot more anchored!

Spring Onions

The spring onions in this picture are dark red coloured and quite large, very unlike the normal ones we get, which are white and much smaller and thinner. I have never seen these dark red ones in our local shops. Anyway, they make a rich addition to the assemblage which was carefully chosen to provide a large palette of colours to choose from.

It was at this point that I realised that I had not got the proportions of my drawing quite right, and I had to fudge it a little to fit, by making the leaves of the spring onions at the top of the picture a little wider than on the reference photo. The result is fortunately not noticeable.

I am always amazed at the difference it makes when I really darken the shadows, in this case with the black pencil. It gave the leaves more definition and produced a more life-like 3-D effect.

Tomatoes

I really love the bright rich red colour of the tomatoes, in contrast to the dark red of the spring onions, and the yellows, greens and orange of the rest of the picture. This vibrant red was produced by first drawing a base layer of lemon yellow in the lighter areas, and then building up a bright red, and finally adding magenta and then black to create the shadowed areas. I always find “negative drawing” difficult – not colouring an area to reveal it, and surrounding it with colour, for insance when drawing highlights. It is somehow counter-intuitive and it takes practice! In this case, I enjoyed drawing the tomatoes and making sure I avoided the highlight areas so that the white of the paper remained exposed, and drawing the fine detail on the stems and calices. It was interesting adding the shadows they cast on the skin of the tomatoes too. It all adds to the sense of realism.

As we work across the collection of vegetables we are rapidly approaching the end.

Peppers

The penultimate vegetables to draw, along with the lettuce.

I wasn’t entirely happy with the peppers, especially the green one. They both looked a bit streaky compared with the other vegetables. I thought I would leave them until I tackled the final vegetable, the aubergine, and see if I could improve things a bit. The lettuce proved very easy to draw, contrary to my expectations. As Phil said, it was a bit of a supporting act to the rest of the picture so detail wasn’t so vital. He did emphasise the importance of really darkening the shadowed areas between the leaves of the spring onions, though.

Aubergine

Finally – the last vegetable in the group! This has been a very long project to draw.

I also did a bit more work on the peppers, adding some more yellow and green and attempted to blend out the streakiness. I am not sure if it’s made much difference; I think it looks more different in real life than in the photos.

The aubergine was surprisingly difficult to do and at this stage I don’t think I’d got it dark enough. Also, in my attempts to ensure that I got the subtlety of the shading and highlights, I seem to have created an aubergine which is distinctly not round! The green end and stalk were also very difficult and I could definitely have done better with this.

Here’s a detail shot.

Background

The final stage was to work on the background, and also to finish the shadows.

Phil had arranged his composition of vegetables on a brown checked tea towel, and it was fun rendering a simple version of this, creating perspective lines and adding a couple of little wrinkles in the cloth. As we added the shadows, we re-emphasised the lines of the cloth with a darker brown pencil. The deep shadows really make a difference to the picture. The other thing I added was some thread-like roots between the carrots on the left-hand side that were visible on the reference. Phil did not bother with detail like this in his more sketchy version.

If I had stuck to the brief and made my drawing really sketchy with hatching lines as Phil had done, I would have completed this project a lot more quickly, but in the end I am glad I followed my own instincts with it as I am happier with a more realistic style.

This was a very full and complicated project with a lot of detail, and many different colours. It was quite a challenge, but I am generally happy with the result and glad to have attempted it and completed it at last. It’s taken me all week to do it – although I did do some other art in between as well.