Bell peppers with spumoni gelato

No, that's not a photo-realistic colored pencil drawing. It's a photo of the spumoni gelato that I just served myself as consolation for messing up a drawing that I've been working on yesterday and today. I suppose it's important to share failures as well as successes, so here's my sordid little tale:

It all started out well enough. Not finding inspiration around the house, I headed over to my neighborhood Safeway to peruse the produce aisle. It never disappoints. Here are my purchases/models-to-be:

The beautiful bright orange bell pepper (not as red as it looks in these photos) was calling my name, so I set it up on my desk,

and chose my pencils (using my indispensable swatch cards).

My plan was to draw the outside and then, next to it, a cross-section showing the inside. I even remembered to take some work-in-progress scans:

I was really happy with how the top and left side of the pepper were shaping up. Instead of going for the blended, burnished look, I was trying to keep that softer colored-pencil texture while conveying a smooth shiny surface. (Does that make sense?) Working on the shaded right side, I was trying to layer the colors without reaching that saturation point where the paper won't take any more of the wax-based Prismacolor pencils. Now, this scan is being kind, but if you click and look closely, you'll see that, all of a sudden, the darker colors shading the right side were coming out all blotchy and overworked looking. (Trust me, the original is far worse than this scan.). I tried burnishing, smoothing, and in desperation, used my blender pen which caught a stray crumb of pencil from somewhere and made a dark streak on the upper right of the pepper. Soooo, I tried to hide that "scar"...the whole thing was like trying to fix your bangs when you cut them crookedly. Ugh.

Now, maybe I could fix it digitally, but do I really want to spend any more time on a drawing that will never be the way I want it to be? No. I'll chalk it up to a lesson learned...and enjoy my ice cream while I ponder doing some "looser" drawings instead of these time-consuming ones. Food for thought...literally!

What do you do when a piece goes awry? Do you live with it? Toss it? Eat gelato?