Autumn Still Life

Autumn Still Life, colored pencils, 10"h x 13"w.

This is another demo piece from my colored pencil drawing class that I finished at home. The lighting here is the reverse of the usual, because I was sitting facing most of my students. I generally ask my students to sit at the tables so that the light from our classroom window is on their left. This is an established convention for drawing by right-handed people so that the hand won't cast a shadow on what one is drawing. Doing the opposite makes is difficult to see your work, but it is possible, particularly if there is another source of light such as overhead artificial lighting.

To reproduce the same lighting conditions in my home studio I placed a small LED lamp to the right of the objects, to try to replicate the lighting in the classroom, but of course, an identical recreation was impossible with such different conditions. My home studio has wonderful natural light coming from a double window that faces north, and my drawing table is positioned so that the window is on my left; I had to try to ignore the double shadows and some of the highlights that this unusual set-up produced. I like the way the apple came out (this was drawn first), but I'm not convinced that the highlights in the miniature corn and the pear, which were added later in my studio, match exactly that of the apple. Hopefully, the discrepancy is not too noticeable at a glance.

The back yard in late November

The colors in the still life echo the fall colors in this photo of my back yard taken in the past week--late November. Interesting how the black oaks have retained their foliage so late in the season, but again, these leaves hadn't started to turn until the early part of the month. Less sunlight reaches the back yard at this time of the year, and there are parts that will be shaded by the house until the Spring Equinox rolls around again. I wonder what kind of winter season we'll have.

Homework

Cape Primrose 7001 (Streptocarpus x hybrid '7001'), watercolor 10"h x 14"w

Recently, I've been bringing the pieces started as demos in my classes home to finish them, as experiments in techniques I can show my students. Obviously, I have to have a good grasp of the techniques before I can show and explain how to achieve the effect to them. So in essence, I've been giving myself homework.

I started this watercolor of my beautiful Streptocarpus hybrid  '7001' in class, and have been working on it to figure out how to render the color and texture of the leaves, as well as come up with an interesting composition. This demo started as a direct line drawing of the two flowers on the right, the two leaves to their left, and the arching leaf above to frame them. Once I had these down on the paper, it seemed to me that another pink accent was needed on the left, so I added another flower, two small leaves, then the two buds and the leaf curling to the left. I'm still working on it, to see how much more texture I can add to the leaves to make them look as real as possible. The leaves could all use a bit more color variation too.

Hyacinth bulbs, stage 1

Another one of my students was having trouble with a colored pencil drawing of some lovely reddish-purple hyacinth bulbs I'd brought to class. In order to show her how to develop her piece, I decided to draw one at home, trying to use similar techniques to what I'd learned at Elaine Searle's ASBA workshop at the Conference this year. The workshop was for watercolors, but I thought these techniques could be applied to colored pencil as well, and decided to test my theory here. I started by laying in some bright Teal blue in the shadows, and pink undertones with bits of Naples yellow, over a grisaille drawing done with a dark sepia pencil (stage 1).

Hyacinth bulbs, stage 2

After the first layer of bright colors, I began to put down the red-purple tones on the bulb on the right, bringing in more Naples yellow, while taking care to leave the white of the paper for the highlights (stage 2). Gradually, I laid in more and more color, varying the purple with magenta, burnt Sienna and dark ocher woven in with dark sepia, to develop the full range of values.

Hyacinth bulbs, stage 3

The challenge here was how to make the surface look papery, with its layers of peeling skin of different colors, while maintaining the integrity of the round forms. It's so easy to lose sight of  the main shapes when you are dealing with the color variations on a surface! The core shadows and highlights must be maintained in order for that shape to remain "readable." Breaking up the surface color to show tiny highlights on the edges of the layers of skin and the veins, I think conveys some of the shimmering quality of the skin. I could continue to work on this piece, to make it look even more convincing, but this is enough for now.

First Frost

Re-blooming iris before the first frost.

One of the irises I planted last year seems to be a re-blooming variety; this is what it looked like on Halloween. Halloween night was very stormy, with almost an inch of rain coming down in howling gusts. The following afternoon it became still, the temperature began to drop at nightfall, and by morning we had our first hard frost.

I wish I'd had the presence of mind to cut the iris flowers and bring them into the house the day before, but I went out the next day and cut the spikes, hoping to save some of the buds that hadn't yet opened.

Purple chrysanthemums.

Pink mums in the Little Indians bed.

The chrysanthemums don't seem to be affected much by frost, and are still putting on a show, as was the foliage until the Halloween storm blew away most of the leaves.

Back yard in late October.

Last week I took my plein air student up to Skyline Drive, and we painted at Gooney Run overlook. It was one gorgeous afternoon, with the fall color at its peak. Unfortunately, I wasn't feeling my best (still recovering from a nasty virus), and while I had made a good start on site, I tried finishing it at home. The results are not very satisfactory--darkening the foreground too much, I lost a lot of the light on those colorful slopes!

The view from Gooney Run Overlook.

Gooney Run Overlook watercolor.

Oh well, not every painting can be a masterpiece, but I wish I'd waited until I was feeling better.