A study of strawberries

As I am going through with my daily sketch exercise this year, I am starting to explore a variety of surfaces and tools to see which combo I enjoy the most and also to see if anything distinct emerges for me stylewise. I felt that the differences will stand out the most to me if I studied the same subject. So, I started with a small glass bowl of strawberries with the intention to graze between somewhat realistic to more deliberate distortions. Along the way, I had a few unexpected realizations that were pretty intense and did not stay within the simple bounds of paper and tools as I set out to explore originally!

I started with a HB 2 pencil (the yellow ones kids use in school) and sketched the simple lines of my object on copy paper. What may seem obvious and something I tend to forget often is that staying with super basic supplies takes away any fear or guilt of making mistakes and actually frees me up to experiment. It is also an excellent warm up.

I usually like to draw things out with pencil but decided to go straight in with my Faber-Castell Ecco Pigment Black 0.1 pen on 75 lb smooth white cardstock this time. The pen glided beautifully on the paper as long as I didn’t hesitate. Whenever I felt nervous, my lines quivered. The lines mocked me and I had to add some quick touches of watercolor – LOT of water, very little paint.

Not having pencil lines to guide me made me feel almost blind and anxious. Sounds silly, doesn’t it? But that’s how I really felt.

Then I took the strawberries out and placed them at various angles before me and did a more gestural take using Winsor & Newton Artist quality Watercolors and soft round # 4 brush by Loew- Cornell on 140 lb Canson Watercolor paper. This 5-minute exercise helped loosen things up a bit for me and dissipate the discomfort I felt while using the pen directly on paper.

While my watercolors were out, I decided to do a full study, shadows and all. I stayed with what I saw before me in terms of lines, colors, details, light and shadow using the same watercolors, brush and paper as the gestural strawberries. If I wanted this to be perfectly realistic, I would have to spend a lot more time on it. So, I settled for more or less accurate and not overwork it to death.

Next, I pulled out my Faber-Castell ArtGRIP Aquarelle watercolor pencils and decided to deliberately push away from realism. I distorted the perspective of the bowl and the shapes of the strawberries as much as I felt comfortable doing. I had a lot more fun with coloring it in with the watercolor pencils and then blending with water. From the bowl to the seeds, I saturated the colors and made bolder marks and liked that it looked weird and still looked like a bowl of strawberries.

By now, I really wanted to eat the strawberries but resisted the temptation for just one more study using Faber-Castell ArtGRIP coloring pencils on Canson 50 lb smooth sketch paper. After a quick sketch with the HB 2 pencil, I started coloring. I wanted to find something in between the two watercolor studies I did, in terms of colors and shapes and this is where I ended up.

When I placed the studies next to each other, I saw the differences in the looks. I found that I like the colors soft, the lines steady and the reality slightly redefined.