Still Life Object Blogpost

Techniques Used : During the still life project art piece I decided to use the compositional device ‘framing' to organize my objects (an apple, pear, and plastic water bottle). Because the framing technique requires one main object to be in front of the other objects, I decided to make my pear the center of attention.The process of this piece started with rendering the basic shape of my objects, to creating a fixed shape, to countering and giving the objects its tonal shadows.  We started off this project by rendering the basic outline of our objects. Rendering included drawing simple circles creating the basic outline of our shape. We had to also make sure our objects are angled in a way where they fit the framing criteria and are in equal and accurate distance towards each other. Then we moved onto contouring, this meant keeping your eye on the object while moving your hand at the same spend of which your eye saw things creating the detailed outline of our shape. Lastly we moved onto shading where we focused on the specific color tone ranges like black and white to make the still life object come to life. Successes When drawing my different objects I really took the value tonal range of shadows into consideration, I first focused on creating the bottom most basic shadows of my objects using the vine charcoal to create the extreme black color, and then blended the gradient pencil with it to create a fadeaway at the end of my objects so the shadows do not look like a circle attached to an object. That was one of the successes I faced, as using the materials like the blending stick I was able to blend the objects edges (like the bottom of my pear and the bottom shadow) to bring the realistic 3D figure to my pear since the bottom of the pear was round and not touching the ground I decided to place my shadow below the curve which created that realistic 3D effect on the pear.  Challenges : However a challenge I faced was creating a balance of extreme dark (black) and extreme light tones (white) as I felt there was no place to put white in my piece because I logically thought no fruit actually has white on them, but once I shut of my analytical side of my brain and really observed the shadows and lighting on the objects I found a few spots on the object which in my art piece could portray the color white. On the other hand, I really struggled creating that 3D effect on my bottle as instead of contouring in a round movement to get that 3D curve I continued to use the gradient pencil to make my edges thicker and darker which just made it look even flatter rather than curved. But with all challenges come success, and I used the white charcoal pen to trace the back edge of my bottle and suddenly it looked like a 3D curved object!