What aspects of each drawing have been successful, and what did you have problems with?
I think I managed to place the objects well on the paper and arranged them into interesting compositions. Proportions are ok, textures are only sketchy but enough to recognize the objects.
For the first still life group in tone, I did not make a good choice with taking pastels because the medium wasn’t so well adapted to drawing small objects. Or maybe it was just technical problems and wrong choice of colours. But the objects tend to fall into each other, they are not well enough separated and the colour choice is not very attractive. Overall execution is too hasty, I haven’t put enough love into the picture.
The second still life group in tone satisfies me more, because its objects can be better distinguished. Building up colours with colour pencils worked better for me than with pastels. The second drawing would have benefitted from more work on the grapes, I think.
What I found difficult in all drawings was to deal with “loose ends” – when I drew a line but got lost and then later when coming back to that part of the drawing, I didn’t know where this line would connect to other objects or their details in the drawing. It’s probably a problem of hand-eye-coordination.
Did you manage to get a sense of depth in your drawings? What elements of the drawings and still life groupings helped to create that sense?
Yes I think I managed to create depth in all drawings, in some I was more successful than in others. Depth was mainly created by having elements overlap and also by drawing lines in perspective that came closer together in more distant area of the arrangements.
This was done with the perspective lines of the table background in the first still life group (the vegetables), and with the parallel lines of the wooden board in the second (the fruits). The pastel drawing of the vegetables conveys the least sense of depth, probably because the object contours aren’t always clearly recognizable.
What difficulties were created by being restricted to line or tone?
Being restricted to line was difficult because shading to create a sense of depth wasn’t permitted. Without overlap, the drawing would have been rather flat.
Restriction to tone on the other hand made it sometimes difficult to separate objects from another. In this respect, the coloured pencil drawing of the fruits was more successful than the pastel drawing of the vegetables, because the finer drawing tool permitted to create small, rather precise shaded areas which helped to make objects more recognizable – especially the grapes.