The season is almost over, though the local grocery stores will continue importing them from some place south of here for a little while longer.  Thought I would capture one so I could daydream until next year.

You’ll probably see these items appear again in future drawings.

I drew these eggs last night as part of my homework.  This week was our second class, and the topic was shading.  We spent the bulk of the class drawing white objects on a white surface.  As boring as that sounds, it turns out to be a great way to learn to see subtle variations of tone; and as you can see, white can actually be pretty darned dark.

My hand-eye coordination still needs some work — the egg on the left is a bit misshapen.  But I feel like I am improving even after just a couple of weeks of class.  If nothing else, I am becoming much more comfortable with charcoal (check out my previous attempts with charcoal to see what I mean).

I stuck with the Cotman paints and waterbrush just for the sake of seeing whether I could keep things from getting too messy.

The main issue I have with this is that I don’t think I got quite enough contrast.  This has been an issue that I’ve had from the beginning; though I do feel like I’m slowly improving in that regard.

I eschewed the under-drawing, opting instead to lay down the paint directly.  Accuracy suffered, but I like the looseness of the image.  I also opted to use my student-grade paints and a waterbrush for this one, because they are just less hassle to deal with; and tonight was all about minimizing hassle.

This is my entry for EDM #116 – Draw Something Green.

Anyway, I wasn’t going for any sort of realism here; just playing with a PITT pen and some watercolors.  This is the first time I’ve been able to get any sort of vibrancy out of the paints, so I’m happy with that.  And the composition isn’t terrible.

My lines got a little out of control in a couple of spots.  I didn’t realize until after I scanned this that everything is skewed a little off-vertical.  All those years of keeping my wallet in the same back pocket must be catching up to me.

I’m really starting to consider laying down a pencil underdrawing before I drop in the ink on these.  But tonight was really about forcing my butt up off the couch and spending a little time with the sketchbook.  Every little bit helps, right?

I probably should have worked a little more shadow into the side of the pasta box.  There’s really no visual cue about the direction of light at all other than the small ground shadow.

And I picked entirely the wrong red for the pasta sauce.  But the only other red I have is Alizarin Crimson, and I wanted to try to stay with a purely transparent, non-staining pallet (only three colors here: Rose Madder Genuine, Cobalt Blue, and Aureolin); which did come in really handy when some of the red bled into not-red territory.

Color mixing is a real weak point for me.  I know I should make some color wheels and do some paint chips, but that is so boring and tedious, I’m not sure I could bring myself to do it.  I know I’ll have to do it at some point, but I can feel my back tighten up just thinking about it.

OK, well, wine and a lemon anyway.  The song is up to you.  Why did I choose these items to draw tonight?  For the very profound reason that they were sitting on the kitchen counter near each other, and I happened to be standing next to them when I decided I wanted to draw something.

This is my first try with vine charcoal – two sticks; one hard and one soft.  Vine charcoal does not seem quite as black as willow, and it seems a little easier to control gradation with the vine. Maybe I’m just getting more comfortable with charcoal in general; I won’t really know for certain until I do another drawing with willow.

It’s probably a little early for me to be rushing to judgment, but having worked with a couple of different kinds of charcoal and different degrees of hardness, I think I prefer the softer charcoals.  Working with a soft, mushy stick of charcoal feels more like painting than drawing.  The hard charcoal seems like it will be useful for working with finer detail and lighter shades of gray, so I won’t be throwing it out or anything.

It’s tax day in the US; and that always make me a little weepy.  Appropriately enough, this red onion brought a tear to my eye too (Everyday Matters Challenge #179 – Draw an Onion).

Continuing with my exploration of charcoal, this was done completely with willow charcoal in an 11×14 Strathmore 400 Series drawing pad that I bought back in January and haven’t touched since.  The quality of the scanned image is a little weird in spots, because my scanner is puny, so I had to scan in four separate images and stitch them together — will have to consider using a regular camera in the future.

I’m still trying to get control over the charcoal so I can get a good range of shading, especially in the mid-tones.  When I lay it down, it is too dark; then when I blend, it gets too light.  Or, I wind up with all the mid-tones appearing to be the same shade, and the resulting image (in this case, the face of the fat part of the onion) looking flat and boring.  Then I start mucking with it, and overwork the whole thing until I kill any remaining life in the thing.  Obviously, Jeff needs more practice.