INTRODUCTION
For my foundation drawing class, we were asked to draw a banana with correct color layering to bring out the shading and light of the banana and surrounding composition.
PREPARATION
For this, I gathered my necessary materials:
-Canson Mi Tientes Paper
-Prismacolor pencil crayons
-Banana
STAGES
The first stage of this was to do a mockup to learn how light plays across the banana, and how violet is layered over yellow to create the kind of browns spots and mottling seen on a banana. It was a decent first attempt, but left much room for improvement.The background has choppy and unreal value variations, the foreground is washed out and the banana's shadow is much too big.
FINAL WORK
For my second attempt, I used a single light source to portray a more accurate and dramatic sweep of light across the banana. My shading was much more accurate, creating the illusion of light playing across an actual 3D banana. I also found it helped the compositon to leave the background blank and the immediate foreground a bit brighter. I also crated a more realistically sized banana shadow and a faint penumbra under that.
CONCLUSION
I considered my final product a success in terms of my ability to correctly see light and color values and translate them on paper. I was happy to see the progression from the mock-up to the final piece.
