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| 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.
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| 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.
