Monochromatic Still Life

You’ve waited, you’ve wondered, and at last the moment has arrived: my first AP Art piece is complete! Every good artist needs to have at least one still life under her belt, no matter how boring still lives can get. Well, I wanted to be sure that this particular still life was anything but boring. My art teacher had told me to do something monochromatic, a fancy word for the same color. So, here it is: a 16X20 in, purple-gray charcoal paper, purple pastel/charcoal still life!

Here’s a picture of the still life itself (I know it’s kind of blurry, but hey, I’m not taking AP Photography, give me a break). In case you couldn’t tell from the picture, the still life consists of 1) a flower (which, coincidentally, is purple in real life), a pencil, and a paintbrush in a glass vase that has beads inside, 2) an origami butterfly that my artistic aunt made for me, and 3) a glass figure of an owl that was left to me by my grandmother.

These next few pictures just show some sketches and then the process itself of the piece. When I was going through the pictures on my laptop, it was kind of cool to watch a pencil drawing get filled in purple little by little.

Initial Sketch:

Colored Sketch:

Started Pencil Drawing On Good Paper:

Beginning of the Flower (way harder than I thought it was going to be cause of the green part underneath):

Flower, Pencil, and Paintbrush (this got really screwed up at one point because my dad MOVED my still life, but I think it came out pretty well):

Vase:

Owl (approximately when I was half done the entire drawing):

Beginning of the Butterfly (there were a LOT of flowers on that dang butterfly.... ):

Butterfly (...but it still looks cool):

And the whole thing one more time!

I would hazard a guess that this piece took a week to complete: the earliest date on these pictures is July 28^th, and I finished today, August 3^rd, so a week would be about right.

What do you think?