Being still in the mood of the tonal study, later that day I proceeded to the ‘introducing colour’ exercise. I wanted to further develop the scratching approach. I thought it might be interesting to use the technique on a wash as base layer and therefore wanted to experiment with my watersoluble wax crayons.
I chose a student grade watercolour paper in size 32 x 24 cm and began with an outline sketch of my celery root. It is an object with a narrow colour range – browns from light beige to very dark, almost black. My arrangement was very simple with the object placed on a red sheet of paper before a medium gray background. I found the colour combination interesting and leaving me room to experiment with additional colours to set some accents.
From the instruction leaflet of the wax crayons I leant that there was a name to the scratching technique, Sgraffito, and that the crayons were suitable for it. But I soon realized that did not work well on the textured paper surface. The paper was ok for the background layer which I painted as a wash, but when I applied the second layer onto the central area where the object was located, I wasn’t able to cover the surface thickly enough for the scratching technique. My celery root was all dark and in an attempt to save the work, I decided to use water to dissolve the paint and take it off with a paper towel. My idea was to do this in a way that would resemble the surface texture of the celery root. It worked so-so, and after letting it dry I wanted to add some details of the surface and root pattern with a linear medium. Graphite was too light and reflective, fineliner didn’t work on the waxy surface, but pen and ink was ok.
I reworked the surface rather quickly to get a feeling whether I’d get along with the technique. I think there is some potential in the approach. I might use heavyweight, but smoother paper and wax crayons for another try of the sgraffito technique, or I might follow up the pen and ink on impressionistic wash idea.
For the next drawing, I decided to go for Sgraffito again, but with oil pastel and smoother paper this time. I changed my object’s position to have an interesting pattern of shades and began to sketch in the composition. Layering the oil pastels worked quite nicely and I think I made interesting tones for the background.
The sgraffito worked less well. I had built up the celery root in colour first, ignoring the details but creating the larger tonal areas, which looked quite interesting. Then I added a layer of black and made a first attempt to scratch out some details using the bamboo pen.
I became quickly frustrated by the prospect of having to scratch away more or less the entire area with that fine tool, and decided to switch to a knife. This was much quicker to remove the black layer but I wasn’t patient enough to go into detail mode to depict all the fine structures on the celery root’s top. I left it at that, quite frustrated by the looks of the result but definitely richer in experiences. For the sake of completeness, I’m including this study, too.
When I made my first little sgraffito of only a framed section of the root, I suspected it might be difficult to extend this to a larger scale, and it seems that I was right. The prospect of having to scratch out that large area with the fine bamboo pen did not work for me. The knife worked, but I wasn’t patient enough to do detail work. If I use the technique on a larger scale, it might work to combine the two tools and split the work into several work sessions to prevent exhaustion.
I also thought I might not need to apply Sgraffito on the entire celery root – it might work if I draw the object in colours for tonal values, and use the sgraffito only for the pattern of tiny root stumps.
I also found that the composition lacked interest. There was not much happening around the object besides a coloured background and a shade. It might be a good idea to draw just a section of the root in the final drawing, like the approach I chose with the first Sgraffito experiment.
But for this exercise, the focus will be on colour and experimentation with media, so I’ll postpone decisions about composition for later.
For a change, I chose watersoluble graphite pencils for the next colour study. I built this study on the contrast between yellow for the light and violet for the dark tones. I first sketched in the outlines and interwoven root pattern, then applied washes to work out the shapes one by one. This was quite a laborious task.
I find this study more aesthetically pleasing than the others due to the attractiveness of the wash, but it was difficult to obtain really dark colours and so the contrasts are a bit weak, which makes the drawing difficult to read. I refrained from working over it because I have made the experience that this easily results in muddy colours.
I made another try with oil pastels, getting back to the sgraffito idea. This time I wanted to make an oil pastel sketch and only use Sgraffito to work out the details for which oil pastel is too bold, following up my earlier idea after the first experiments. I chose a light green as base colour and a darker green for the shades, then added brown and finally black to work out tiny structures.
The drawing looks rough because I focused on learning and experimentation, not on producing a pleasing outcome. What I learned was that I needed a thick layer of dark colour for the scratching, because otherwise the marks were hardly visible. So while the darker green tone looks nice and gives some depth, it was actually not very helpful for the sgraffito. Despite the problems with this drawing, I felt quite comfortable with the technique, and I liked the soft green colour.
I considered doing a truly representational colour study of the celery but re-reading the instructions I found my object fit into the category of “low key colours”, and being realistic with colour would mean to make a quasi monochrome tonal study in beige and brown tones. So I decided to be experimental with colour and choose from intuition.
For the final study in this series, I chose light blue paper and coloured pencils. I wanted to use the light blue as a base colour and work in the dark tones using contrasting darker colours. I began with yellow to sketch in the main shapes, then went gradually darker using light brown, dark red, and dark gray for the shadings. I made some highlights using white pencil and overworked the entire object with yellow to give it a uniform colour which would hold the object together.
This drawing was made using a fresh celery. The first one was very dry and the root pattern was very chaotic. This new one was a bit easier to interpret and I thought it would be good to draw a different pattern for a change.
I think this drawing is quite well executed, although the overall effect is a bit weird. It doesn’t really look like something edible. Some learning has taken place – it sees to become a little easier to draw the forms, maybe a side effect of the new celery. Three-dimensionality is quite successful in this drawing, although the effects are very artificial.
Reflections about using colour
Overall, I’m not very satisfied with my studies so far. I think the main problem is that the celery root itself is a basically monochrome object, so all the colour experiments look quite artificial.
In addition to this, I didn’t like depicting the entire object. I felt obliged to do so because instructions advised it, and it was certainly a good exercise, but it made every drawing a tedious and exhausting experience. Also from a compositional view, I think it doesn’t work, because it’s basically a round fruit that looks very similar even from different angles. The interest is more in the distribution of smooth surface to root pattern over the composition, which would come out better if I made a close up.
For this exercise, I just focused on the effects of different colour combinations and with which media I got along best, but I’ll have to approach the compositional question too.
For the media, I liked sgraffito best, because I like the rougher marks I obtained with this technique. Coloured pencils seem to seduce me to create soft, round shapes and this creates a different character for the object.
I think I cannot decide on a successful colour combination at this point. My choices felt arbitrary once I began using colour in a non-representational way. That is, once I’m working on a drawing the choice is not at all arbitrary but follows intuition. Currently I feel inclined towards sgraffito using soft green as base colour and overworking it with black.
I think my choice of object was a difficult one because the object does not convey a sense of beauty, as a flower would. The celery is a fascinating object with interesting properties, and so what I’d like to achieve with my drawing is to convey what fascinated me about it. This doesn’t work at all with the ‘whole object’ composition, but I think it was there in the little section sgraffito I made in my sketchbook.
I feel that the guided exercises are a good starting point, but if I want to get somewhere with my chosen object, I need to go further than that. I am realizing that developing a good drawing is not a linear process of following some outlined exercises and then the final product comes automatically from it. Instead, the most satisfying moment for me came when I did something on my own by producing the first little sgraffito in my sketchbook.
I could continue for quite a while with colour experimentation to explore all the possibilities, but in view f my time frame I think it’s better to proceed to the next exercise. I hope that the task of focusing on a selected area of the object will bring me closer to resolving the compositional problem, and it might make the choice of colour develop more naturally from it.