Candy Land

I enjoyed working with the oil pastels.  I've never worked with them before without smudging them with my finger, and I think the effect I received this time around was fantastic.  My only problem with this was that it was very annoying when you were trying to layer colors (especially lighter colors over darker colors, because I'm me like that).  I think I did the shadows on the wrapper well enough, though I did the red of the 'Jolly Dancer' before I layered the shadows and highlights, which really wasn't a good idea. I should have started with the highlights first, then the shadows, and worked my way through there.

      I'm not too happy with the way the ends of the wrapper came out.  To get the particular color, I had to layer yellow first, than orange, than yellow, and I forgot to put yellow down first on the left side. Also, I don't think I conveyed the stiffness of the wrapper well enough.  Also, I don't think the shadows were pristine, but I had layered so many colors over each other that it was hard to put another one on top--it wasn't sticking anymore.

 

I was actually absurdly proud of how this one turned out.  I didn't think that I would be able to do the peppermint, let alone the rapper, but it all came together really well.  I also usually smudge chalk pastels with my fingers, just for the practical application that that keeps dust from getting everywhere (I would just like to mention that both pastel drawings have  my fingerprints all over them because I am horrendously messy in this regard), and I was really impressed that I was able to create this picture without doing that.  I wish I had pushed my values a bit more on the bottom, but personally, I think the wrapper is awesome.

      I colored in the red first, and my tablemates suggested that I should just leave the parts that were supposed to be white blank, for dramatic affect, and I am indebted to them for their input.  I really think that if I had added some blue or green to the red on the bottom of the peppermint, at the part where it turns away from the viewer, it really would have looked that much better, 

      I actually did use my finger a little bit on the wrapper--I forgot this, but I got some white dust from the lines and pushed it around the paper with a finger to create hopefully a short of transparent sort of shading?  And then I went over the lines with white again,  I wasn't too happy with that in some places, but overall, I think the affect was fantastic.

After I finished shading this, Anam told me that if I rotated this drawing 90 degrees to the right, it would look like the helmet of a knight in shining armor.  And now, that is all I can see when I look at this picture.  That's why I had to turn it the other way.  

         I have never enjoyed working with colored pencils this much.  I was so happy with how the prismacolors blended--I never had to fight them for anything. I wish I had pushed my values a bit more, and incorporated more contrasting colors into my piece, but it was better than anything I was expecting to create with colored pencils.  The smaller words got a bit smudged, because I wrote the darker words on first, and then started shading with white and stuff, which wasn't really a good idea, so some of the words have been obscured. I think I did a pretty good job of representing the creases of a wrapper, though.

      Originally, I had just two different shades of brown and white on this wrapper, but someone left an orange at my place one day, so I decided to start playing with it, and I think it improved the shading quite a bit.  There are some places, like the crease that looks a little bit like a tent that, from this prospective, is the furthest south, that I wish I had done better with, but I didn't want to erase it and risk messing up the colored paper, or another part of the lollipop, or just smear the colored pencil across the paper . . . I am proud of it, though, and I think it looks pretty neat.