Tag: Drawing fruit

Best of the Bunch

bananas

Or the least worst of the bunch. Drawing bananas is one thing but drawing them foreshortened is tricky. I found myself triangulating the black flower scars, as if I was looking for the pattern of a constellation. The repeated curves are more difficult to relate to each other.

I turned them around and tried an easier angle.

bananas

 

market blues
Wetherby market last Thursday

The banana is, botanically speaking, a berry, as is the kiwi fruit. The onion is a bulb.

kiwi

onions

ficus branch (artificial) old cherry tree

I got a chance to draw an old cherry and a Ficus benjamina (an artificial office plant version) on my travels recently.

There are now only three double-page spreads to go in my old sketchbook, then I can make a fresh start for the spring!

The Dark Side of Bananas

tomatoes, pepper and bananaI like to keep life simple and my sketches are usually line first, then colour. And that’s it. But here I wanted to indicate form too. I’m not good at multitasking so could I simplify the process to three discrete stages; line, form then colour? It didn’t quite work out.

Using the Tower Pen nib in the dip pen and brown Noodlers’ Ink, I drew the orange pepper first then added a tonal wash in paynes grey. Blue sits opposite orange on the colour wheel, so I guessed that a wash of orange over the greenish-blue Paynes grey would add form without throwing the colour off-key. The Paynes grey should theoretically work as an neutral shade. It’s not such a bad solution to the problem but the drawback is that I’ve lost the transparency of the orange. I’d like something more luminous.

For the tomatoes I remembered the advice of botanical illustrator Agathe Ravet-Haevermans; lightest colours first. The tomatoes started as an overall pale golden yellow, omitting only the highlight. The calyxes and stalks started as an ochre yellow. I prefer this approach because what I might lose in sculptural solidity is made up for in more luminosity. The white of the paper is still able to show through. A tonal under-drawing of Paynes grey would be more suitable for an architectural subject.

Bananas have long been problem for me. What colour is dark yellow? Again I started with an all over pale lemon yellow and instead of having neutral shadows I looked carefully to try and see the hints of green and sepia reflected in the yellow.

Just the kiwi-fruits left to draw now!