Herbal medicine

 I went with herbal medicine ball wrapped in leaved and tied with a string of sorts, I was originally going to have just a few plain medicine balls but that would be quite plain and adding the leaf wrapping gave it a better shape overall and also gave me a chance to study the way a leaf can twist and how light may work with a translucent material such as a leaf.

Sketch

When I was sketching out the idea for the medicine ball I wanted to have a distinct silhouette as it was set apart from other circular objects. I also need to consider how I will wrap the medicine ball with leaves, I thought of a few things such as how many leaves would I need how would it close. String or long and sturdy grass would make a very good piece to tie it all together so I went ahead and sketched out this idea, having the leaves overlapping each other and tied together. I also needed to consider how the leaves wrap around spherical objects as the leaves structure is key as they are not as fluid as material I will stick to that he's been considered and wrapped up in it leaves around the ball.I'm really happy with the overall sketch although it is rough it does give the idea that I want to talk to me and the real challenge is adding colour to this which I think I'll do use internal drawing first and then using overlays to add colour afterwards this means I can focus on the shadows and light worry about colour language immediately

Tonal

When painting in the tonal work I tried to keep in mind the anatomy of a leaf, its thickness in perticular as this effected the way light played upon its surface and if it shone through it at all . I also tried to show the layering of these leaves more through the shading, having the leaf that flicks outwards as the lightest so it draws the eye more.

Colour

To add colour to my drawing are used gradient maps, this allowed me to add large chunks of colour without doing detailed painting over top, it also allows me to find tune the colour I wanted. I chose an evergreen colour for the leaves wrapped around  the medicine, although it doesn't fit the ominous nature of the world it is setting I thought it be a nice contrast  to have bright green leaves when the world around it is played by death, it also informs the contents since medicine brings life and help which I believe a bright green leaves does nicely. I went for blues in the darker areas of the piece so it will have an overall called a look to still keep a theme but the highlights are a warmer yellow which contrasts cold blue which not only works well in a technical sense but also again symbolises this element of hope in such a dark dreary world.

 I think to improve I would add more highlights and small elements of colour in the veins of the leaf this would make them have more depth which I think is very important for the piece. I would also redo the string as I don't think the way it is coloured works very well especially in comparison to the detail around it,to resolve this I may go back in and add more details such as texted strain like small marks around the ties which would make sense contextually .

Overall I am happy with the outcome, I think the writing worked really well in the peace and the ability to show translucency of belief came across very well in the end I do think it would be nice to see more of this in the veins of belief which is got something I would improve for next time. I think my favourite part of this pieceIs the way that believes wraparound Paul this was challenging for me to figure out the way that the lease will mood affect the shading and also please are not of flowers material because I'm not a stiff materials are very strange in between, so this was quite hard to navigate but managed to do it through trial and error and it turned out very well in the end. I think the string time there lived together could be improved to making it look moreHey bike rather than looking like a simple piece of string. It could also be nice to experiment more with the colour variation looking more awesome Chinese or even dead leaves which will make it more macabre which may fit the theme better but I do like the use of the evergreen leavesRestoration the medicine may cause he's almost an element of who is such a drab and dreary. I really like the way the vains turned out, barring the issue I discussed earlier and lighting, the way it twists around the leaf with the consideration of the shape and size of whats inside wrapping I think work very well and the way I showed vains to have depth also turned out pretty well it was a very main concern of mine.

revision base on feedback

Here I added leaf veins to give the leaves more texture. I also added some more highlights to push the waxier surface of a leaf further but not too far since I did want it to be slightly dried out since its been in storage and it doesn't have any preservative on it.

References