Candy Still Life

As it says in the title, we had to choose a piece of candy, so I chose a Kit-Kat for the subject of my piece. The setting behind it is the white pice of printer paper that it was on top of. This artwork was made by first making quadrants to make the proportions easier to sketch out more precisely; then I began the sketching with a graphite mechanical pencil to get fine, light lines; after that, I did a red wash in watercolor paint around the majority of the Kit-Kat, so that in the end there wouldn't be any white spots showing through; then, I went over that base in many layers of acrylic paint, slowly building it up from darkest to lightest colors; finally, I watered down brown acrylic for the shadow to give it a transparent look, and added different details for the logo in black ink. I chose this because all of the other candy package seemed very difficult. In this, I used several different elements and principles such as line, color, value, form, contrast, and movement. It is relatively centered on the paper; however, it did activate all 4 sides of the paper.

I don't know what the composition rules or techniques are, so if I did use them then they are somewhere in there. I was changing this constantly in the sketching process, trying to get all of the proportions correct to the actual object, being the Kit-Kat. Also, I was originally going to do all of the writing that you can see on the the wrapper; however, I ran out of time and patience, so I didn't want to ruin what I already had.

The meaning or story behind this artwork is that it was the selected assignment that we had to do, so I chose the Kit-Kat because it had the nicest colors and I knew that it would be the easiest to accomplish well, while still being somewhat challenging. There is no real way that this project relates to my life, other than that I made it and that I slightly enjoy Kit-Kats. If I were to go back and revise anything, I would probably take the time to add the writing that is on the left side of the wrapper to make it more interesting and realistic to the object. Possibly making it look more like a photograph, since after all, we are doing photorealism. (I think)