Vegetables Still Life

Much like fruit, vegetables are suitable for still life drawing as they also have different shapes, colours and textures. So in the unlikely event that you don't have any fruit at all, you can use vegetables instead.
Or you can draw vegetables and fruit together. Never thought of that one did you?

An exercise I did many years ago involved drawing 5 different vegetables, as individual images, with each one being done with a different medium. That way you have to explore different options instead of just pencil. Some mediums to use are: pencil, pen, watercolour paint, acrylic paint, chalks, charcoal, pastels, crayons, inks.

Those are just ideas to do on paper you could also use a computer program like paint or Photoshop, create a 3D model using Google SketchUp or a similar program.

Continuing with the 3D theme you could try a sculpture from clay or wood or cardboard. Or instead of a sculpture do a carving where you cut away from a flat surface leaving a raised form of the image you can see.

It is probably easier, for now, to stick with the paper versions and there are 9 options to choose from.

I wasn't intending on doing this exercise but after I started writing this post I think I will do it, I was just going to do a still life like the fruit one. It is an exercise that forces you to expand your range which is important for developing and growing as an artist.

Some of you may be wondering why I separated watercolour and acrylic paints and the answer to that is quite simple...

 They are not the same.

Although both are a form of painting they are different and produce different results. Watercolours have are softer and not as bold as acrylics and need a bit more care when working with them. Acrylics are thicker, bolder and can easily be painted over if necessary. To show you the differences I have just this second decided to use watercolour and acrylic paints as 2 of my 5 mediums.

Lesson over now let's look at the still life vegetable images I did.

This first image is, quite obviously, a carrot. It has been done in chalks, it's a little rough and chalks can be very messy to work with and difficult to create depth, texture and shading. I will do a post on using chalks in the future.

Secondly we have a courgette (zucchini) that has been done in oil pastels. Oil pastels can also be a bit messy and they seem to resist mixing together so again shading becomes a bit more tricky.

Thirdly and lastly, for now, we have a red onion that has been done in charcoal. Charcoals are incredibly messy and you can end up with black hands and charcoal all over your page if you are not careful. It is a lot like working with pencil except you need to be a bit more careful with your movements but as you can see below you can get a very nice picture from it.

An idea for you to do yourself is when using charcoal use a paint with it as well. Pick one colour of paint, preferably an acrylic or poster paint, and use the paint for highlights etc. instead of leaving white or grey areas.

I still have 2 more pictures to do and I think that I will use acrylic paint and pen to do those with. So keep your eyes open for them.

Update 17/07/2013

My other 2 pictures are complete one has been done in pen and the other in acrylic paint. They are probably not as good as the previous 3 I did because I wasn't really in the mood for doing it and rushed it a bit.

Anyway here they are:

Above you can see my image of a mushroom drawn with a blue pen. If you wanted to you could use more than one type of pen but using just one type you have to think a little more about shading. Cross-hatching or  hatching are good ways to shade an object because you can use larger and smaller gaps between the lines of the hatch to create more or less shadow.

Below we have the final picture which is of a red pepper. This was painted using acrylic paints, acrylics are thicker and can be painted over to create layers of depth and shadows unlike watercolours which have a tendency to blend together.

If you are wondering why the background is purple it is because I was using the Rolf Harris method of "killing the white". When he paints he first paints the whole canvas in one colour that is not white, it is usually purple he chooses. Apparently this helps eliminate the colour blindness etc. that comes with a white background because we often compare colours to white if there is none to compare it to our colour choices should be better. Or something along those lines. 

Although I usually pair pictures together with a photo of the actual thing I was drawing I thought that on this occasion it may be too many pictures. We all know what certain vegetables look like and likely have them in the fridge to look at and use whenever we feel so I thought photos may have been unnecessary here unlike in the Dice Stack post where I created the stack of dice and so you wouldn't know what I was drawing unless you could see the real thing.

That concludes this post on still life vegetables. Just like the 'discussion on pencil drawing' post I did I will do some similar ones on the other mediums used here so look out for those in the future.