Golden Delicious

My neighbor's Golden Delicious apple tree is loaded with fruit, despite its height of less than five feet. They were quite greenish in color when picked, but have now ripened to their beautiful eponymous color. That monochromatic coloring doesn't lend itself to a drawing quite as dramatic as the Gala variety that I drew a while back, but I really loved the brown marking on the skin near the stem. Now that apple season is upon us, I'm hoping to fit in drawings of a few more varieties for this series:

Any favorites you'd like me to look for?

Happy First Day of Autumn!

A Trio of Buttercup Squash

Prismacolor colored pencil on Stonehenge paper

(click to enlarge)

I love going to the grocery store or farmer's market in the fall. The piles of pumpkins, brightly colored gourds and winter squash are irresistible to me—and such a variety of shapes and colors! Many of these buttercup squash (not to be confused with butternut squash) look like little lidded jars or pots. They're pretty cute, and after we try them for dinner tonight, I'll let you know how they taste!

Here are some shots of my "models" and work-in-progress:

After I do the sketch, I often scan it and print it out at different sizes, so that I can pick just the right size for the final drawing.

Greens are tricky to scan: You can see that the greens are much more accurate in the daylight photo than in the scans...hopefully the final scan at the top of the post shows the true colors, or at least close!

If you're not all squashed out, 

take a look at my drawing of my all-time favorite winter squash here.

Happy First Day of Autumn!

Horned Melon

Horned Melon, Cucumis metuliferus

Prismacolor colored pencils on Stonehenge paper

Have you seen these little spiky creatures at your grocery store? I saw some a few months ago, but didn't buy one as I had no time to draw it then. I've been scouting the produce section for them ever since, and—lo and behold—there they were last weekend! (I was going to get two, but that was before I realized they were about $6 apiece. Yikes.)

The horned melon is also known as the kiwano melon or the African horned melon, but I prefer its cute nicknames: hedged melon, blowfish melon, and jelly melon.

I drew the outside first and tried to see if the spikes fell in any kind of pattern or symmetry. (You know about my obsession with radial symmetry in nature.) But they seemed to be rather randomly arranged. So imagine my surprise when I cut it in half to draw the inside: My cut went through 3 spikes that were in an almost perfect equilateral triangle! In fact, the whole cross-section was shaped like a circle with 6 flattened faces. The cross-section looks very much like a cucumber (which is in the same family).

I am intrigued by fruits and vegetables, such as watermelon and kiwi, whose insides are in sharp contrast to their outerwear. This one pretty much wins the prize in that category, doesn't it?
(And, no I haven't tasted it...yet!)

Three limes and a paper bag

Prismacolor colored pencil on Stonehenge paper ("Fawn", I think)

Approx. 5" x 6"

I bought some limes the other day to make this yummy melon gazpacho. As I was unpacking the groceries, they tumbled out of the bag and I thought they looked so beautiful—their bright, shiny green skins against the brown paper bag. (This drawing is a bit looser than some that I do...I had to get those limes juiced for the gazpacho at some point!)

But as I was drawing, I couldn't decide who was the star—the limes or the paper bag? Who doesn't enjoy the age-old classic challenge of drawing a crumpled paper bag? The limes won out, so I left the bag as just a few lines and shadows. (Now I'm in the mood to draw the bag all by itself and let it be the star this time.)

But the image above is a cropped version of the actual drawing. I've written posts about cropping before (here), but it's always an interesting challenge for me. I don't draw digitally, but I have come to rely on (or be dependent upon?) the Photoshop cropping tool. It's probably not a good thing that I know that I can, for all practical purposes, "compose" my drawing after-the-fact. I could play around with cropping for ages—I love being able to crop an image different ways for different uses, frames, etc.

Here's the actual full drawing:

And this one is "zoomed out" a bit further than the image at the top of the post:

And a square formatted one, for what it's worth:

What do you think? Is the cropping tool a crutch or just another wonderful tool to work with? Oh, and which of these cropped versions do you prefer?

Pretty Peach (and one that's a bit off)

Prismacolor colored pencils on Stonehenge paper

(click to enlarge)

I'll tell you right off the bat that I'm not all that happy with this one. Maybe it's because I realized, partway through the drawing, that the shape of the half on the left isn't quite right. I probably should have scrapped it then, and started over, but I worked on, hoping things would look okay as they were rendered.  But when it's wrong, it's wrong, and I think my heart just wasn't in this one after that point. It happens.  Although I did really have fun drawing the the peach pit!

Peach pits...I must detour a bit down Memory Lane. When I was a kid, Avon had this line of toiletries for girls called Pretty Peach. We had a few treasured items, but my hands-down favorite was this set of 3 soaps. (I just love things that have a little surprise inside when you open them.) To this day, I can't cut a peach in half without thinking of these:

(Isn't Google image search amazing? Found this on ebay.)

Okay, onward and upward to a better drawing next time. In the meantime, here are some WIP pics to distract you from my misshapen peach half. (Apologies for the uneven lighting; I just snapped these with my iphone at my desk rather than stopping to scan.) Have a peachy day.