Frozen in Time
Stephanie
Art 30
McNally
This was a pencil crayon project assigned to me in art class. The teacher told us to include a pepper, a box, a cylinder, a cone, a ribbon, and three spheres. When planning for this project, I had a sudden inspiration. I remembered seeing fruits frozen inside ice cubes in the Garnier shampoo magazine advertisements. The ice cubes made the fruits look very fresh and delicious. That was how I decided to put the bell pepper inside a transparent cylinder. After I drew it out, it turned out to look quite nice and realistic. The bell pepper's texture looked really nice, since I looked at a real bell pepper when I drew it. Deciding that I liked the ice cube effect, I went home and brought a plastic cherry to school. I tried my best to use intense pencil crayon colours to bring out the shiny texture of the cherry. It was then that I realized I did not have a burgundy coloured pencil crayon for the cherry. But after experimenting with several combinations of colours, I was finally able to create a colour that matches that of the cherry. The smooth texture of the cherry was also hard to bring onto the paper, but after concentrating on the way light reflects from the surface of the cherry, I finally finished drawing the cherry! For the ribbon, I looked at a ribbon on my shirt and captured the silky texture on paper. I found out the first step to drawing realistically is to use a real object as a model.
For this project, I decided to use grey paper instead of the traditional white paper, so I can experiment with different coloured backgrounds. From this, I discovered that the white spaces between lines do not seem as obvious with grey paper. On white paper, I had to press my pencil crayon really hard to cover up all of the paper, or it would not look realistic. The grey background also brought out the transparency of the ice cube, cylinder, cone, and spheres. I thought the shadow casting was the most difficult part of this project. I chose to position the light source in the lower left corner, so that it would create more contrast in the drawing. However, because the objects were floating in the picture, I wasn't really sure how to draw the shadows.
Overall, I really liked this pencil crayon project, because it made me more interested in the pencil crayon medium. I used to think of pencil crayon drawing as a very tedious task, but I learned that if you use grey paper and focus on the textures of each object, the result can be a really beautiful piece of art.