Drawing Using Oil Pastel P.61

Drawing Using Oil Pastel  P.61

For this exercise, I really wanted to fill the paper with colour, and I thought the strong colour of peppers would make an excellent composition to draw. I wanted to get away from fruit or veg that blended from one colour to the next, I thought of using grapes or tomatoes but but found they had not enough variation for what I wanted to do. For the background, I was looking for something that was quite colorful but not a repetitive pattern as such, and I found my daughters fleece throw over, which was a bold, large scale cartoon picture, I positioned it so that it would not necessarily be identifiable as a cartoon image. I then positioned the peppers in a way that would compliment and stand out against the background. For example, I did not want the yellow pepper on the right because of the yellow background and likewise with the green. Logically red would go in the middle and I positioned the peppers at different angles to one another to show different form.

Original photo of my piece. From my perspective, the peppers were probably not as brightly lit as they are on the photo, and my view point was more to the right.

I did my best to leave white paper showing through and get the graduated effect that the exercise asks for, this is quite apparent in the red pepper and at various points around the background. I resisted the urge to add shadow as such to the base because the fleece was not really picking much shadow up, the tips of fleece had a slight sheen which I tried to suggest via the scratching technique where a shadow would be. I also wanted to give the suggestion of the creases at the edges of the fleece without using too darker colour, so I applied white pastel over the darkened tone to give a smoky effect. This is probably the most "abstract" piece of art I have done, as I like a picture to make sense, but with this, I thought I would let loose slightly and let the shapes shine through a bit more, whether this is a successful piece, I am unsure, as I often change my mind as I look at it.