Shopping still lfe

Having done the shopping early I had no excuse not to take some of my purchases and get on with the next exercise. I arranged them on a tray which was then put on a box on the table to raise the level up in relation to my working position.

I'm not fond of plain white paper so I lightly toned it with pale terracotta and naples yellow pastel blended with a paper towel, and applied fixative. This was a risky strategy as I had never worked on top of a fixed surface before so had no idea what problems I might have.

I didn't want the outlines to dominate as I was using colour, so I sketched in the main shapes lightly with a 2H pencil before pulling out my old watersoluble crayons (so old that I barely have the complete spectrum left among the survivors-which was to present its own challenge).

I worked up the different items in no particular order, starting with the bag of pasta, and leaving the ketchup till last as I knew that without a dark red or warm brown crayon I was going to find achieving the colour difficult. Eventually I layered up various reds, purples and browns, but needed something to unify it so had to change to a Ruby Earth pastel pencil. Likewise in order to get a good black tone I also used pastel.

The highlights on the box edges were lifted out with an eraser, but because of the ground colour I couldn't get a clean white, so used a couple of touches of white conte just on these areas.

My favourite bits of this picture are the bag of pasta, whose highly reflective surface made it very difficult to define shadow and light areas without a lot of squinting, and the lid of the jar, where the only two colours I had were yellow ochre and olive green, which I think produced a better result than if I had had the obvious choice of neutral warm grey-browns for the metal.

The weakest area is the top of the juice carton where the domed top proved difficult to get right- I over-judged the width ratio so it is a little bit wider than it actually is.

This is the first time for years I've used coloured pencils and I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed working with them, much more so than with pastel. I did realise that I had fallen into my old way of working and was being shy with the strength of tone, and I didn't have a burnisher to hand to work the colour into the surface which would have improved the appearance of the ketchup bottle's surface. Still, I've realised that I need to replace my old Caran d'Arche pencil set, so I'm off now for a little on-line retail therapy!