I started this exercise giving me the freedom to do what I felt like doing: Exploring the scratching technique using oil pastels. I took an A3 sheet of white paper and laid a pale green base layer, then worked over this with pale yellow. This was to be my light colour. I then added a thick layer of black. The paper had a little bit too much tooth so the black was not absolutely dense, but I thought I’d just experiment and see where this would get me.
I used a knife for scratching out the main contours, then began working more thoroughly. I tried to focus on three simple tones: Light, medium, and dark. I combined this with either contrast of tone or blending by scratching only lines, not areas. Making this drawing felt like a liberation and I was very satisfied with the result. I like the rawness of the drawing, the abstraction and the mystery about its forms. It was a departure from the instructions for this exercise but I felt it was the right thing to do.
For the composition, I had started with a new section of the new celery root, using the viewfinder. I think that it was a huge improvement for the composition to use only a section of the root. Framed like this, I saw lots of interesting views I could have taken as a basis for the drawing.
The next day I set out to make another close-up. I tried out different views and finally settled on one that combined smooth surface with interwoven little roots, and also showed a little bit of the green background. I chose hard pastels for this, because this permits drawing light on dark and I thought I might use this to draw in the fine light linear elements.
I began the drawing as a light sketch, then reworked and refined until the paper surface was saturated. I think I did a little bit too much, because the gray colour of the paper isn’t visible anymore, and the three-dimensionality is somewhat exaggerated. But overall I’m satisfied with the result and think it is an interesting drawing.
The colour choice of the second drawing reflects my aim to try a realistic depiction, since I saw the celery root consisting of mainly light to dark brown tones. But the result doesn’t look very realistic. I might as well choose different colours for the final drawing. This might contribute to the alienating effect of enlarging a small section, moving towards abstraction.