Three bell peppers and a tomato

This week, for the first time in years, I bought a couple of colored pencils. My plan is to use them on the pen and ink portraits I draw on my commute, so I chose a few colors suitable for rendering skin tones.

As I haven’t yet had the chance to test them for their intended purpose, I thought it would be interesting to try them out on a scene with similar hues. To this end, I set up a still life using some fresh vegetables that my parents had just picked from the garden.

I started the sketch by drawing the ink outline, and then proceeded to fill it in using a limited palette of reds and greens. In the end, I cheated and painted the stems with a touch of watercolour.

At first, the still life seemed boring and uninteresting, but it was a useful exercise in observing and rendering the subtle shifts in hue and saturation in the local color, as well as the changes induced by the interplay of light and shadow across the surface.