watermelon

I didn't have much time for the lesson this week, so I tried to keep my subject simple to try to really focus on the edges. This is a bowl of watermelon. I was going to do a cupcake, but I couldn't resist the red watermelon in the bright green bowl.

 

So, the bowl certainly isn't much, nor is the sketch in general to anyone but me most likely, but I was really thinking about hard vs. soft edges the whole time, primarily the hard edges of the melon against the bowl (change of plane and color) and the softer yet still distinct edges of each melon chunk to its neighbor.

 

I tried this a few times, totally loving the way watercolor can describe watermelon. Super fun to add water to the red and see it instantly form the texture of the melon. But enough of that, I had to get it finished somehow. In trying to resolve the interior melon edges, I overworked it and lost the highlights, but the experiment was useful. I knew immediately that ink would be too heavy for the edges.

 

First, I tried shaping the chunks with deeper red. That didn't quite do it, so I tried light shadow lines with paint. Okay, but looked a bit weird. Tried punching up the red a little to see if it would help somehow, but that was the overwork. Oh well! Next was a dark gray watercolor pencil, and that seemed to be about right, wish I'd tried that first. I have some Noodlers Lexington Gray in one of my Lamy pens, so I used that to define the bowl just for fun. I didn't care so much about how well I drew the bowl--I was after the edges idea, and I think I learned quite a bit from the process.

 

Done