Tone and value

 For this exercise I chose to make my still life with more material variation, some of the still lifes i have done previously have used harder simple objects but here I wanted to push myself to be able to translate fur and material softness into a drawn piece. Since it was done during Christmas time I went with festive objects.

I also turned down the saturation on this image before I started so i could check the variation of value throughout the image which is seen below.

Sketching the shapes in ...

This was just a rough sketch I did to get my basic shapes down, done by blocking out general shapes through measuring the scene and then filling in details . I did notice some errors in perspective in the piece which I corrected later on, these errors include the rocking horse which I couldn't get the angle on the perspective right, also the hat isnt as deflated as it was in the still life 

Adding the tone

[image retake needed due to bad quality]

I added tone here gradually starting from light to dark as I normally do however to start with I left out areas with fur so I could focus on  the later. I do notice that although the angle of the rocking horse is improved it still isn't spot on around the head area and the tail is angled a bit to far forward which would my main improvement note from the rocking horse. I was quite happy with the the shading on the horse as it has nicely informed lighting. I think it could be pushed a bit further to exaggerate this more though which may make it look even better.

The large Santa toy was quite hard to get right as it has so may different materials to consider and I do think its the weakest point of the piece as i tin k I didn't quite get the folding of the jacket right and this effected the overall figure and this is something I would definitely improve by going in again with more shading and possible a paper blender to smooth things out more. I did however like the way I shaded the fur as i really wanted to keep it looking as fluffy as possible and I think I managed this whilst still showing the shadows and direction in the fur, I also managed to define the edges without them looking too harsh through the use of line variation which allowed me to only outline certain areas and give the overall impression of an edge.

On the topic of fur, my favourite part of the piece is the fur on the hat as I faced the challenge of the embroidery on the fur section and at first I wasn't sure how I was going to translate this in to a drawing but through some trail and error I managed to figure out if I sketched out the main tufts of fur overlapping the letters and then used the darkness of the letters to frame he fur then it turns out nicely and i ended up doing the same method for the shaded areas which I found a bit complicate but this method simplified and made much easier to process.

After feedback:

[images needed]

the key points of feedback i received from my tutor was to further establish lighting and depth within the piece through shading which I managed correct and is most evident and had the most benefit on the Santa as it wasn't sunken into the background enough at first. I also went back into the fur to add more line work based on feedback which helped to further render the piece.