Drawing 2 - Part 1 Project 2 - Using Space

The Scottish Gallery Edinburgh has two short videos of Elizabeth Blackadder talking about her painting and printmaking. Her book The Nature of Things has objects arranged quite formally on plain white backgrounds so I guess this wasn't one of the styles I am to take inspiration from. The BBC has a nice slide show of her images. White Still Life is doing what we were asked to do in the last exercise as far as it has multiple viewpoints and pulls the objects together. I'm very excited by Dragonfruit, bold colours and confident angles, the white background reflects the flesh of the fruit.
This exercise asks for brightly coloured objects to be pinned to coloured paper or fabric. Subverting things slightly, at Christmas I attach brightly coloured objects to a fir tree so this is what I have chosen to draw. I've drawn my Christmas tree many times over the years with varying levels of success. First some sketchbook studies using coloured pencil and water soluble crayon.

These 2 studies are on A3 paper (sorry you can see the ghost of the next drawing through the scan). I need to draw larger.

This is still a very small study, about A4 size. Using coloured pencils on black paper I tried to draw the light coming through the branches from behind but it's a laborious job.

 Even severely cropped it's not working for me.

In order to enter the drawing from the side and work up to the edges I did double page spread on 2 sheets of A3 in my sketchbook which I scanned separately and stitched back together. This is with water soluble crayons again to help draw bigger.

Its not in Elizabeth Blackadder's style and there are large areas that have no drawing and are just space around the tree. However I developed some methods to represent the baubles which I'm reasonably happy with.

 Cropped the big drawing fulfils the brief better so I drew a close up oversized view on A3 paper.

This looks quite a bit better scanned and reduced in size here than it does in real life. I think the problem is that in real life the baubles look ridiculously over-sized. There is an area of plain white paper at the top left hand side but I'm leaving it there as I think adds balance the busyness of the main image. Still aiming for a larger than life picture I used pastels on sugar paper.

It's very brightly coloured in a bland sort of way, but again looks better reduced in size. In the spirit of experimentation I broke the "rules" and added charcoal

I think the charcoal is just confusing but I'm still keen to get some darkness into the image so I had another go with pastels this time using black paper as my support.

The big bauble is actually made from mosaic mirrors but it has lost its solidity in this version. Other than that I like the depth from the black background. This black paper lacks tooth so if I worked from bottom to top I removed most of the pastel with my sleeve. I sprayed it liberally with fixative and had a go at editing.

I can see where I've fiddled and to me it's starting to loose the original freshness and look overworked.