Candy Still Life

In this assignment, we had to practice shading to create 3-D objects before starting the candy still life. Before the candy still life, we had to create four spheres using one type of media for each, ex. color pencil, charcoal, ink, and watercolor. The actual assignment was to draw a still life of-of two pieces of candy using burnishing and valuing techniques.

In the sphere practice, I drew four circles for the four different types of media. The ink sphere was made by a cross-hatching technique to serve as the shadowed part of the sphere and transitioned to a stippling technique. The sphere's shadow was made using the stippling technique. The charcoal sphere was made by valuing the shadowed side with a dark charcoal and then using my finger to give areas that are more exposed to light a lighter value. The color pencil sphere shadow was made by burnishing the color pencil. The watercolor sphere was made by layering on top of the watercolor after the paint was dried. Each of the spheres was given a darker background in order to hide the outline of the circle found in the light reflection. In the candy still life, I arrange a mint and an opened Kit Kat on the viewfinder and cropped it so that there were two edges being "touched." I first used a pencil to outline the candy and then used watercolor to color the candy itself. I then used color pencil to color in the candy wrappers and burnished them to make them look solid. Initially, I used grey to shade but then used purple to create the shadow. I also added swirls, dots, triangles, and rectangles in watercolor.

Since the subject of this composition was Halloween candy I created the background to reflect the spirit of Halloween. If I were to do this again I would not use a grey colored pencil to shade.