Traditional art practice: Shape and Pattern (Week 2)

This week, we were tasked with emphasising shapes and patterns.

I tried to reflect this in my work - I believe I made a good impression on the base drapery, it shows good use of folds, furthermore, the way I went about shaping out the flower is a very strong selection of this piece, using the negative space to define the petals.

Shapes were emphasised using line, for example the curvature of the vase, furthermore adding line onto areas like the pepper helped define the texture and surface, making it readable as the object it was meant to be.

If I could change anything about the piece, I would have analysed the shell, because it doesnt seem to be too correct in terms of perspective. To break this down further I would make them in basic shapes along with making ellipses where the shell edges would be most prominent. From looking at the piece, the look very 'oval like' which skews the perspective of the shell, it would also help to add a drop shadow to perceive the depth in the scene. Additionally, I would add more curvature to the vase in order to convey the roundness of the object. Overall, the piece has very strong elements and good shading, which can be seen in the contrast of light and dark tones - using negative space and emphasising highlights.

As a point of practice, I would focus on trying to get details on white/off white objects as I find this was the most difficult thing to achieve on this piece. 

What did I learn from this piece?

Coming back to week 1's piece of work, using line to correlate tonal value helps this piece, using outside line to define lighter objects can help the viewer understand what the object is.

These are my thumbnail sketches for this week,

I decided to work on object composition, but mainly within the tray as I felt overall the composition worked really well, But I wanted to play with the arrangement of objects in the tray in order to see what worked. But I decided to go with incremental size toward the background in order to show depth.