Cyclindrical still lifes

 

For week 10 we were asked to make up a still life of rounded objects, so to build up my scene I used a wine bottle, Christmas crackers , an angel decoration and a candle holder. I chose these because they had varying shades of darkness and they were mostly all reflective which I have found a challenge to recreate using pencil and I wanted to challenge myself a bit.

The initial sketch

To get the basic shapes in I blocked in boxes were the items were in the scene based on my measuring, which I did using a pencil. This gave me a bounding box to flesh out the items shape more and fill in smaller details. One that was particularly difficult to get down was the candle holder as the base was quite had for me to make out in because of the lighting in the room and also the way the neck blends with the base was hard to get right on paper but I think I managed it in the end

The most successful part of the sketch in my own opinion was the crackers as I managed to simplify down the key shapes and didn't include every single crinkle as it would be hard to decide going forward and was a thing I could re introduce later on.

I think I could have paid more attention to the symmetry in the wine bottle as it looks a bit uneven as is but I did end up fixing this later on when shading the piece

Tonal shading

Using a range of pencils from 2b to 6b I added in tonal shading, by slowly building up the tone I tried to recreate what I was seeing and I think it turned out pretty well.

The most successful part in my opinion is the crackers as the metallic shiny surface was a challenge for me going in and is why I chose them because I wanted to see if I could recreate it. I learnt that the contrast of dark and very bright highlights close to each other is what gives that reflectivity of the material without making it look dented. 

I am also happy with the way the candle holder turned out as I managed to use the highlighting on the bottom half correctly as it inform the structure of the item further.

Improvements could be made to the shading in the angels dress as to make it look more like the crystal structure that it is as it didn't quite come through in the drawing as much as I would have liked it to

Also the bottle isn't perfectly symmetrical and the right dips a bit in comparison to the left, measuring the dimensions more thoroughly may be the solution to this, focusing on the measurements on one side of the line of symmetry and then reflecting that across. The shading on the wine bottle is good however as I am particularly happy with the recreation of the light reflections near the neck of the bottle.

based on feedback I enhanced shadows and highlights which ended up further pushing that shiny effect on the metal and wrapping on the crackers, more detail was also put into the base of the angle decoration to show the transparency of the plastic and how it lets the colour of the candle holder through is a dispersed way.