The pastel still life project. The paper that this project was put on often give whomever is holding it orange or red fingers, due to the fact that i applied a LOT of pastel to make it. When i first started this project, I was at a loss of what to create. I didnt know what I should add, what items I could draw or anything! Fortunantly enough for me their was some plastic fruits that where laying around and the crackers where actually a part of my lunch! So now i have the items....but what to do with them? How should i arrange them? This is where the thumbnail sketch comes in. A thumbnail sketch is used by artists to quickly sketch out and plan how their artwork will look, so that they can use it as a reference point and know where to put items on a later date, and to just know where things go. However, for this project we also used a veiwfinder-or a hole cut in carboard-to put everything into perspective. To help us see where our objects would fit, and how big to make them. This helped me a lot cause with all of these items I as already confused with all the possibilities of how to arrange them, and so the view finder helped me to see that having a pear overlaping just a bit over another fruit, would help to add and show where the objects are. The composition on this project is a bit interesting to me. Normally if we want objects to appear bigger, we would put them near to the front. However the giant fruit in the back is still bigger than all the other objects, even though it is in the back. I wanted to test that out and see if I could get it to work, and lo and behold it did! The best part about this project in my oppinion, is the lighting and how it affects the objects. As you can see, a light is coming in on the right of the project, and reflects on the plastic of the crackers in their wrapping. Its not a big powerful light, but it still adds little shadows off of the items in the pastel and adds to their 3Dness. Without the shadows not only it look a little...bland.. but it would take away from the roundness and circularness of the fruit! However, just simple shadows didnt make the objects appear 3D. Although if it did that would be pretty nice! But art doesnt work that way so I had to had a bit of darkness to the lower portion of the items, and make the top part of the items a bit brighter as to show the 3 dimensional part of the project. This was a little bit challenging because I had to make sure that the colors were still the same, but that their hue was just a little bit different.