Still Life Sketches of Man Made Objects

 For my first sketch I chose five objects, a lipstick, the lipstick lid, mascara, nail varnish and a nearly empty bottle of perfume.
I liked the composition but felt it was a little busy for a small sketch.

I used pencil and cross hatching for the shading. I used the pencil on the side for the frosting on the perfume bottle, and picked out the highlights with a rubber.

Having taken out two objects I liked this composition much better. It was less complicated and I liked the balance of the three items

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Next I wanted to test some new pastel paper. As I've never used this before I first used charcoal. I loved the effect of the heavy grain and only need to add more pressure for the shading. With such a bright arrangement I couldn't leave it at that and wanted to show the colours in my sketches. I used pastel sticks and pastel pencils. The sticks were harder to use and mainly relied on the pencils and rubbed in the dust with a contour stick to make really dark shadows and highlighted with white soft pastel.