Assignment One - natural objects

I have completed my first assignment! I have undertaken pencil sketches exploring form and composition of both a natural and man made still life.

The first of these being a composition of natural objects - "Harvest Festival". I decided upon the use of vegetables including a pumpkin as they are abundant in Autumn and appropriate to season. As instructed I arranged my produce in a variety of compositions and lighting to try and capture the best image. And, despite my r experiences within earlier projects still made the composition too busy - but happily recognized this before starting to draw and simplified my composition by removing some items ... however the size of the pumpkin obliterates the lighting on others and this was a problem. I also decided that the apples in the first composition were 'lost' and actually weren't congruent to the other vegetables so decided to 'lose' them.

The problem of the pumpkin remained. Sensibly i perhaps should have removed the pumpking from the composition but I enjoy the shape if it's stem and hence wanted it to remain. So, rather than remove this point of interest I decided to try introducing a larger object that would in turn 'balance ' the pumpkin - enter the cauliflower! This change definitely balance the composition better, added congruence to the whole but presented the challenge of how to reasonablay represent a highly complex cauliflower?! I like the texture it introduces alongside the 'flat' texture of both pumpkin and carrot yet this questioned what medium to use to represent the composition?

On having undertaken 2 further very crude sketches, I decided that the composition worked best as a simple one, with few objects that illustrated texture as well as form - deciding to use drawing pencil and ink on cartridge paper (A2). I have discovered that I enjoy drawing with an ink pen very much - enjoying the immediacy and definition it provides. I felt this technique would offer the best textural representation of the 'small rounds ' of the florets of the vegetable - dripping ink in blobs and flattening them in places to create rounds.

I am disappointed by my representation of shadow within the still life and also the positioning on the paper - I should have identified the shadow better and the placed the items on the paper so that the shadow could all be seen. I am also now pleased with the representation of the carrots which I found really hard to draw and despite my best efforts on the cauliflower my daughter could still not recognize it - which cannot be good!!

I will explore my man made drawing tomorrow as I am full of cold and must crawl back to bed!!