Apples on a bough, student art display, adult drawing class, 10/02/16

Apple lesson:

We practiced drawing a flat circle and turning it into a sphere first, by just drawing an arc around it. We layered in shading to make it more spherical. With the highlighted area these spheres look like pool balls. We did the form building with black crayon. Then we lay in local color, red. This is a type of  grisaille  drawing. (They told me it was spelled grissaille, but I thought not. Guess what! I am right. Look it up.) If a sphere is in such strong light it will cast a shadow so we drew the cast shadow. Apples in a tree cast their shadow onto other apples. We tried a similar exercise drawing a green apple casting its shadow onto another green apple. A shadow cast onto a spherical form is different than one cast onto a flat surface. Our reference photo had some examples of this light and shade effect. We did some quick continuous line drawings of my reference photo. Then students did their final drawings working as they wished mostly from the reference photo. One could use the whole image or home in on a section of it. One person had brought in a real apple picking photo and used that as a reference.