It's that time of the year when people in the Northern hemisphere celebrate their harvests of fruits and vegetables. It's autumn and the colors of summer sun warm our hearts and tasting buds with mouthwatering melons, blushing pears, plums, peaches, grapes, apples and pomegranates.

Let's paint them, let's put these colors in the cheeks of peaches and pears for a long lasting memory of the sun of July and August.
I invite you to bring in your palette and choose from my pics or your own real life fruit platter the most attractive peach or pear and give it a try in color pencils, watercolor, acrylic, pastels and why not, oil.
This challenge encourages color accents in any medium you choose even crayola crayons, colored chalk, markers, felt pen or let's say digital rendering.

Please have a look at my photos and decide for yourself.

First a family portrait. with grapefruit, apple, pear, pomegranate, bananas, watermelon and grapes.
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apple and pear
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4 pears
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apricots and peaches
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a bowl of apples

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bananas
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grapefruit
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grapes
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lemons and pomegranate
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cut melon
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Just think of that still life that you can enjoy for many years to come or make a gift to your friends and relatives.

Prepare your palette and let's start getting ready for Octoberfest with a splash of color.

Added quinces, the queens of autumn fruit.

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Just think of that still life that you can enjoy for many years to come or make a gift to your friends and relatives.

Prepare your palette and let's start getting ready for Octoberfest with a splash of color.
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What a great idea, Elena! I like this idea very much. Will see how many I can do. Thanks for the work you put into the pictures, setting up, and photographing and posting them.
Trish

Hi, Trish. Glad to see you here. I am sure we will have a nice time coloring apples
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Here is some fruits from France to you friends !

Merci, An. What medium is that, acrylic?They look great!Very professional painting!

elena, this is a nice thread and i have broken out my color pencils..i am doing a warm up for the family guy challenge and shall choose one of these to start on after..time for a switch..charcoal, pencil..now some color..there is a lot to do now on the forums and ack!! i am trying to participate in them all..feast or famine hunh?

Thanks Kay for the thought. There is no rush. I just thought that fall colors are lovely in fruits and vegetables. My husband eats tons of fruit so we always have the platters full of them and why not paint some?
That's good about art that one can switch media in order not to get obsessed or bored with one medium.
I love colors and my pastels are ready for some additions.Take your time and when you feel like joining feel free to post your art here.I'll be close by.

In response to An's challenge for drawing pears in pastel here are my three pears in oil pastel. Enjoy!

Several layers of watercolor pencils dry(caran d'ache) and over them oil pastels on white Canson mi teintes pad 8.5 x 11 in.This was done in two phases. First I tried caran d'ache on pastel paper and didn't like it then after a few days a finished in oil Pastels.

my bananas.. colored pencil

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OMG, Kay, your bananas are better than in real life !
Some awesome work, my friend.Bravo!
Also thanks for participation.I know it's not easy to be everywhere and we have plenty of challenges but isn't that great that we can spend our time in such wonderful way doing art?!

thanks very much elena...today i shall try the apple and pear..i have been cooking today..not much time..but i shall now settle in and try to draw that lovely pair..this one reminds me of your poem..

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Ok This my attempt at doing fruit in CP. Not half as good as all the good work you guys are doing but I am only just learning when it comes to doing CP work. I did this by copying a step-by-step demonstration from a good little book I have called Drawing with colour pencils by Jonathan Newey.

wow kev..look at you it is wonderful to see you here with your artwork and it is lovely..colored pencils are a real challenge too to use properly..so welcome to learn with us..

very good execution of the lesson, Kev. My husband would love to see your work mostly because it has no colored background. He is allergic to backrounds, he says they distract the viewer from the subject.
Thanks for participating, Kev and work more with CP you will develop the skill in time. The only part i don't like in Cp is that they take an eternity to materialize, all those layers .

Thank you Kay and Elena, yes CP are much more of a challenge. Not only have you got all those layer to do but for me my main problem is learning how to see colours and getting true depth of colour in my drawing

here are my pair..
to me the worse thing about colored pencils is to be like 3-4 hours into a picture..and one stroke, just one, can ruin the whole drawing and all that time..i am like sooo super careful when i settle in to do a big drawing..i love doing big drawings in cp...like that victorian era lady in my gallery..she is very large..19x24 if i remember correctly..she is tucked under the bed right now..

i put my weekly drawings on my fridge (refrigerator art) as no one ever did when i was a child..and my fridge is full right now..i take them down and stick them under my bed in a case as they are rotated week to week..

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Wow, Kay, your Cps are real good. I love the pear, it's awesome. You used the eraser here and there for the light effect, did you?
Thanks again for your time.

thanks elena..i wish an eraser could do that..no i burnish the white..just rub hard with your white pencil..

Great CP work Kay. I know what you mean about just one stroke. I think the secret is to try and make your mistakes look like part of your design, after all 9 times out of 10 only you know it is a mistake

Starting last week first watercolor after 12 years of rest for this medium

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Today, experiment with pomegranate juice coating of the fruit.

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and a bowl(sorry for the shape) of peaches and pears.

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All in watercolor (tubes) on watercolor pad 9 x 11 in.

And my three pears in watercolor, on watercolor pad 5x9 in; 1/2 hour.
The background is done with wash from teabag of hibiscus and rosehips tea.I don't like it, I find it too strong.

Nice Elena, I can almost smell the rosehips from here

Obrigado Clara. The one that awaits a try is the apple tea. That is very fragrant, indeed.

elena i think this one is lovely..perhaps instead of leaving white around the image bring your colors up to it all the way and really deepen darken the immediate area around the fruit to make the light pop out..

Thanks, Kay. i will do that.

Hi, Elena and friends, here is a contribution in color pencils. I have to learn more on CP. Do you know "good" trademark in CP to buy ?
(Elena: my last contribution was in pastel)

An..that is so beautiful..very professional as always..i prefer derwent color soft, and prisma color...they work well together and blend very nicely..

An , I started with crayola. Here are my apricots in crayola.
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Than i bought some cheap cp called Roseart that cost me 10 dollars for 72 pencils.
here my work with them.

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and this summer on a Swiss flight to cairo my husband bought me caran d'ache watercolor pencils which I used use dry. They are excellent quality. Here is my work with them.
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The secret is somewhere else. The paper. I found that the best paper for me using CP is Stonehenge.See my crayola work done on stonehenge.

oh my so many wonderful colored drawings
I have been wanting to participate in this for a while now, I was waiting to get my new water coloured pencils and now that I have I gave the water melon a try.
The plate is completly wrong
I did this in about 1/2 an hour and no measuring at all.
the bigger shadows are from the scan, my paper was a little wet so it crumpled a little so those shadows appeared
anyway I did it with love for you Elena

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Clara you have an awesome piece here. Thank you for the dedication and be honest wasn't it rewarding to see it so refreshing for time to come to admire it?Bravo!
I love you too.

glad you liked it, thank you Elena
I'm just learning to use these water colored pencils and they are fun to use

great job clara..the colors are very vibrant..

Wow elena..all of those are beautiful..i love the peaches..and the watermelon too the best ..but they are all lovely

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Some fantastic colour work has been done for this topic. Thank you Elena for starting it. I still have a love hate relationship with CP but I feel I learn a bit more each time I do one Heres my attempt at doing Elena's apricots and peaches

those are lovely kev..they look yummy..all bright and shiny..nice fruit you have drawn there

Kev, thank you so much in participating. You improve by the minute, no doubt you are an artist already and each medium is different and challenging. You will become a great CP artist if you keep practicing with CP. Already your progess is noticeable.very pleasant work. Maybe you should add more layers, I know it's a test of one's patience CP but is rewarding when the color look glossy and thick like a painting in oil pastels or oils.

A few things which are not meant to discourage you but help in drawing better. First I posted the pictures for reference in case you don't have on your fruit platter some fresh fruit at the moment you want to draw for this challenge. But my suggestion made in the first post was to encourage you draw from real life. Second, this is supposed to be still life for which the canon of this genre is to draw realistically. You can also try a version of fauvism, impressionism, surealism if you are up to it but most likely you will try to render a peach or a slice of melon the way you see them in real life, i.e. realistically.
Now for realism each medium needs to be addressed separately as they have different ways of expression. But they all tend to render volumes by the intensity of colors, by the pale light and shade and not by lines.
When it comes to light in watercolor, I learned from Adolfo's lesson on light that we leave the paper white and not covered with wash or color.
In Cp we can do that with light yellow and shading more areas that offer the contrast. In other words what in Italian is called chiaroscuro we can do in color by the intensity of the hues and layers of paint or CP.
Another problem that I noticed white drawing my watermelon reference for my challange was that the slice in the dish did not correspond with the cut part of the melon in length. I tried to address that but is was too late. Also the yellow and green stripes of the melon should converge to a point at the botom of the watermelon offering the realistic aspect of this fruit.This can also be done in faint line and checked for accuracy before we start layering the colors.
Another aspect of Cp that needs to be taken into account is to blend the colors in a certain area of incidence. For instance we don't have patches of clear green,yellow or red in peaches but the color are rather diffuse and blend at edges.
I still need myself advice in color so that was the whole point of this thread to encourage participation and exchange of knowledge in coloring with different mediums.

For drawing with colored pencils, oil pastels, painting in any medium, oil, acrylic watercolor all we need is to begin with a good sketch that in the end reflects our skills in pencil drawing. The values that one renders with graphite are replaced by the values offered by different hues and shades of green, yellow, red, etc.

You understand the values on the fruit as well and the light and shade areas.
Here is a quick demo of my photo with apricots and peaches.

In the second photo I circled the light area and the tones/values x for medium value, yellow for dark value. More or less accurate because my software didn't cooperate.

One thing I need to make sure I understand correctly, and probaly here a teacher or artist can step in and help with the answer. The way I see it is there is light and shadow and there are light, medium, dark values which are given by light and shade. So let's say in the peach at the right bottom there are degrees of yellow, redish, green, purple and also a patch of light (usually rendered by a shiny spot)and a patch of dark close to dark brown.Is that correct?

this is a graphite(2H, 4B) study for my oil pastels and watercolor work.THis is 1/2 hour work I hope to add the apricots soon.

Yes, you've got the right idea Elena on the values. Values in colour are a little more difficult to achieve than in shades of grey usually as you have both colour to decide and values. Putting a colour photo into greyscale helps enormously with value selection as you just remove one element entirely. In photos where lighting isn't strong you can alter photos a little in a graphics program such as Photoshop through posterizing. This gives you a more distinct range of values to work from even if it isn't present in the original photo.

What I do when starting a drawing is create a value map in my master drawing before I ever use colour. This drawing becomes my reference, rather like the photo on the cover of a jigsaw puzzle. In the drawing, I draw the shapes of the values, lights, midtones, darks, shadows, details etc. I then transfer my final master line drawing to a fresh piece of paper before I ever add colour in any medium.

I know this sounds like a lot of work before you get to the good part, but laying the groundwork pays off I've found.

Thank you Jeanette for your time and explanation of your own method.
Well said. It's a lot of work. Now I will tell you that I am very bold and my oil pastel pears were done in Caran d'Ache CP dry and then layered over with oil pastels. No greyscale,no study in graphite just color like a pro.(the boldness is not my self confidence in my skills but I was looking for fun.)
It was for exercise in the beginning but turned out to be one of my best oil pastels that even Adolfo admired .
But this time I need to learn patience and be more methodic like doing a study, doing it from real life, so the colors have to be more set in an architecture of layers and chiaroscuro.
I guess we beginners want to jump into painting after a few weeks and this is an impulse of everyone new to artmaking.Now I become more aware of the time element, that all has to come into place in time and with a lot of practice and observation.

Thank you again for your help.(I remember that one of the first things I checked out on this site was your lesson on CP tomatoes. That made a strong impression on me and I said to myself "One needs to be an artist to draw in CP like this."
The whole idea is obtaining the volume by layers of color and also blending and this is now in me an internalization that came from practice. When I just saw the process and heard about layers in your tutorial I was too new to artmaking to fully understand the concept.The more I work, the more I learn and the advice received just becomes verified truth.So what I am saying is that art cannot be taught and learned by theory alone. You need to do it yourself to understand most of the process.)

Hello all,

this is a first sketch in a small size for my homework for watercolour evening class. The homework has to be finished next wendsday on paper size 30 x 40 cm. This sketch is done with Derwent Inktense but the scanner took all of the brillianz the colours normally shows.

Ulrike
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I agree Elena, that practice on your own is a key ingredient in success in art. You need to know the technique of how to use the medium and tricks of the trade to get there. Honing those techniques until they become second nature to you takes time and lots and lots and lots of practice.

I've had 30 years of practice and still need more.

Welcome to the color challenge, Ulrike.
You have a nice piece for a start and I am sure that you will emphasize even more the play light and shadow in the final painting.
I know what you mean by the brilliance taken away by the scanners. Scanners are against us in web galleries and the real work is never rendered true to the original.

Thank you for participating.
I hope you will post the watercolor too and if you have questions or want to share your experience about the subject or the medium feel free to do so.

This is my little (literally little!!) contribution to the challenge.

WOW Elena! ....U have a Stuning Pictures here!
....I with a big pleasure, will try to do a one too

Hannya, outstanding CP work, love the water drops. When I first saw the thumbnail I thought it was a photo

Goldlaus, Another great CP work. Maybe a cast shaddow on your drawing would bring it more to life What are Derwent Inktense like to use?

Hello, everyone. Kev, I was just wanting to let all know that Sarah's apples are in Oil Pastel, a fantstic job she did on her first OP work. I was so admirative so impressed with her work when I saw it in her gallery time ago that I invited Hannya to bring it to our challenge for being a beautiful piece af art.Grazie, mille grazie cara Sarah.

Irmina, you are welcome to choose a pic and give us your wonderful art in acrylic and colored pencils that can inspire and educate us in color.Thanks for accepting the invitation.

Oil Pastles thats amazing