February ACEO Theme Week, "Sweets."
ACEO TW Sweets Fruit is this month's entry in ACEO Art Cards Editions & Originals group's monthly Theme Week. Like all other ACEO TW entries, it starts with a minimum bid of $4.99 the way my Frost cards did and my Favorite Book cards did last month. Instead of doing a wide variety of them this time, I focused and did one really careful entry.
I finally got down and tried the serious colored pencil realism still life style. I took my Rainier cherries from a reference in Gary Greene's Painting with Watercolor Pencils and did the plum from memory along with the plate, the peach colored wall, the metallic lines around the plate (no need to microwave a dish of fresh fruit!). The apple is a bit special. At one point while I was living on my own in Minneapolis waiting for food stamps and benefits that didn't come till I had Social Security, I ran out of food. I wound up literally starving for a while, I even ran out of ramen and instant pudding packets, all my stockpiled food was gone. A friend gave me an apple, a Gala apple as a lot of other friends identified it from my very realistic colored pencil drawing.
I looked at that apple for three weeks or so, eating the last of the ramen and holding off on it. There comes a point of hunger where you really don't feel it much, it was a weird long fast in some ways. I loved how it looked. I got obsessed with drawing that apple and finally did it perfectly along with its shadow on a page in my hardbound sketchbook. Today I went back to that page and worked from that drawing as if it was a photo reference -- and managed to get some of the feeling back, it brought it all back to me as I drew the one in the ACEO. I threw in other fruits I remembered as tasting wonderful, since I love cherries and dark plums when they're ripe. I like the way there's a pale blue sheen on dark plums sometimes.
So here it is, my latest experiment in colored pencil realism. If I had a lot of fresh fruit around I'd have probably tried doing it from life, but I wanted the fruits I enjoyed most in it, not what was randomly in the house.
I also posted my Yupo Valentine today on eBay:
ACEO Rosebud Valentine is now available.
Now I need to do a good one with a bird, the Small Format Art group has a Theme Week too and the theme is the one I voted for, "Birds." Hehehe. My specialty, especially raptors!