For this exercise I was asked to set up another still life, the aim was to introduce colour while still observing tonal values.
All but one of the objects in my still life had a smooth reflective quality, the coarse string would need a different approach to the hard shapes being reflected. Whilst the glass bottles all had a colour I wasn’t so much focused on representing their true colours, I have a limited set of oil pastels and I thought using colour this way may be more interesting.
The liquids inside offered smooth tonal; transitions and hard distorted shapes, I tried to use my yellows and oranges to represent the lighter tonal values and the purple blue hues to convey the darks.
I was pleased I chose a palette that wasn’t true to the subjects, this took away the focus from trying to recreate the exact hues and saturation and focus on the tonal values. I also used to think that reflections in in glass or mirrored objects were quite daunting, but with all the glass items at my disposal its certainly something I’m more comfortable approaching now.
The coarse string, while it was affected by light was much more simple to separate, very little steps in between, I did try to break it up visually by adding a few colours next to each other, hoping that would give the feel of a rough coarse item.
