Pumpkin Shadow Project

DOORWAY OF LIGHT

My goal, as was with my last project, was to create an image in hyper realism. With this project, I allowed myself to use extremely dark charcoal with high contrast with eraser. I focused mainly on shadow. I saw how the shadow landed on the pumpkins and if it gently fades from light to dark or if it was a direct change. I feel that I accomplished my goal well enough for me to be proud of the drawing. Then again, I am still getting used to working with items such as charcoal and erasing to form highlights. The most difficult part was trying to get the pumpkin to appear realistic. I worked from one pumpkin to the next, focusing on just the one at a time so I could get the best view of shadow and detail as I could. To me, the smaller pumpkin in the middle turned out best. It seems the most realistic. I feel as though I learned a lot through this project about the importance of value and contrast in a drawing. The mentor that came to my mind while I was drawing this was a Russian artist named Ilya Kuvshinov. She primarily draws people and landscapes, but she works greatly with the idea of shadow and how a lot of shadow goes a long way, but so does minor detail, to create a wonderful piece of art. In class, I mainly looked to my instructor for guidance since I had no past experience of drawing with such dark colors and using charcoal on a project like this. If I were to go back and fix anything, I would try to possibly blend a bit more to get rid of the streaky texture in the back and on some of the pumpkins. However, I think that if you squint your eyes a bit and maybe tilt your head you can see a very realistic drawing of pumpkins, and that I am proud of accomplishing.