Observational drawing

"Observational Leaf"

Graphite and charcoal

8"x10"

The subject of my creation is an observational drawing of a leaf, pinecones and a stick. My project shows many different values, ranging from light to dark. When drawing observationally, I like to focus on making my subject realistic and getting all the shadows and reflections the object may have. There's a lot of white space in the background, so I faintly used charcoal to give it a faded feel.

For this project, I started out by first drawing a from observation of the subject, in the arrangement of my choosing. Its hard to match the shape and size of the objects with the actual size of the piece, but my drawing looks like actual scale. I first started by drawing everything from observation, then i went over it with charcoal and lighter/darker pencils. For the background I lightly shaded it with charcoal and blended it with my fingers. It was hard to show all the many details on the leaf.

Throughout my artwork, I used to value, I did this because I wanted to make my piece realistic and everything has values. I also used contrast to make it stand out from the other objects and the light background. At first I wanted to make the leaf colorful, but I decided not to, so it didn't take away from the other subjects. My next steps in this project would be to lighten the leaf to make it look more realistic and also add more lines when the creases on the leaf are.