Drawing and Shading and Coloring, Oh My!

This past month I have been challenged with tasks that I thought I could never accomplish.  With a little push and confidence I found that I was capable of what my teacher, Mrs. Kiick, assured me I could do.  I tested myself and made a lot of progress.  It was still difficult reaching my required goal regardless of how well my pieces may have turned out.  Between the two tasks we received, the jar was, and currently still is, the more complicated to create.  Even looking at the two pictures, it shows the level of difficulty between each work of art.

Coloring

Candy is colorful and fun, but the act if drawing it is a challenge.  A jar full of candy sits on the table in front of me with wrappers and more candy spread around it.  Our task is to draw the outlines of the jar, the candy inside of it, and the candy around it.  Then, when wee are done drawing the outlines, we are given colored pencils to make the picture come to life.  This is by far more difficult than it was to draw the bike.  Coloring in the jar is not as simple as coloring in a coloring book.  The reflections coming off of the jar create shapes and patterns of color that we must capture in our drawings.  Fortunately, Mrs. Kiick gave us a worksheet where we could see what certain colors do to each other.  When it was finished it looked like this:

After some time working on the handed out worksheet, I had more understanding with the correct way to shade with colored pencils.  My knowledge, however, wasn't enough for me to feel content with coloring my jar.  I took my time to work on some tracing paper until I was comfortable with jumping into my drawing.  I practiced twice before Mrs. Kiick suggested I dive into the real thing.  My two practice papers turned out looking like this:

I finally began my final drawing and am still only starting.  After many classes of anguish this is the completed product:

Shading

Coming in to art class one day, I was surprised with a bike.  The bike stood on a table in the middle of the room with its front wheel slightly turned to the left.  Instantly I thought, I can not do this.  However, after a few practice rounds I was feeling more confident in myself.  My practice drawings ended up looking like this:

After seeing how I improved from the first drawing to the second, I gained a little more confidence with the bike.  We began the final drawing of the bike I got the hang of it.  My mind went from 'I can't do this' to 'I am doing this'.  After sketching out the lines, I filled in the space with different shades of pencil.  Using the 2H, HB, and 6B pencils I was given, I was able to make the bike jump out a little.  The pencils helped darken while my eraser and the sticky grey eraser allowed me to bring light to where it hit.  In the end my final drawing looked like this: