Candy Still Life

To start a general idea for my final piece, I first took several pieces of candy. This was photographed, which was the base of my inspiration and my reference image. I chose these several candies because I wanted to incorporate boxed objects, bagged objects, and miscellaneous candies that were outside of the package. I wanted to have variety in my project. 

When I began physical work on paper, I  started by mapping my grid method. I sketched a 4 by 4 grid across the whole paper. This way, I could work square by square to make better proportions and map out a realistic drawing. Previously, I used a website to add a 4 by 4 grid on my image. I printed it out and used it for a reference when drawing. My graphite sketch took a full two hours, which I time-lapse recorded using my iPad. I started with general shapes and then moved on to smaller, more finished, and detailed lines. The text on the packages took me the longest. I redid the text many times before I was happy with what I had sketched. After, I went in with my Prismacolor Premier colored pencils. I started with the Dots package and made the yellow background. After layering, I made fine details and text, including highlights with my white colored pencil. I continued to the Dots outside of the package, the yellow hard candy, and then the Swedish Fish package. After this, I resumed work with several graphite pencils of varying darkness. I used them to make shadows, as well as orange and yellow colored pencils to create a lighter shadow with "color reflection". The coloring portion took around 6 1/2 hours, shadows took around 1 hour, and the entire project total was around 9 1/2 hours. (I used the stopwatch on the clock app)

I have gone through several processes from the start of my project, to the finished version of my project. One process was choosing and arranging the candy. It took me a couple of tries to find the arrangement of candy that I would base my project off of. As said before, I wanted variety with the candy that I chose and arranged. Another process that I went through was revising my work over and over. The text was a difficult part of my drawing to complete. I did not like the first, second, or even third versions of the text that I had drawn. I think that it is worth it to revise the text because it highly influences how realistic your drawing will be. During this project, I also had to make many decisions. One of these decisions was the colors I would use. I think that color picking needed to be very accurate to draw the candy realistically. It took me a while to match the colored pencils with the colors seen in the image which needed to be recreated. Since I tend to be a perfectionist, I notice many details which need work to look realistic. I don't think I will have the time, nor will it be worth it to fix these small imperfections. People often think perfectionism is good, but deep down, perfectionism can be a  burden. We often struggle with thinking something isn't enough, and that you have to have perfect grades to be good in a class. Besides this, I think that I have enjoyed the project overall because creating realistically is one of my strengths, as well as using colored pencils.