Lemon Still Life

A couple weeks back I started summer lessons working with a very talented young lady...this little girl is going into third grade in the fall and over the summer we'll be working on refining her drawing skills. I'm so excited to be working with her!

For our first lesson, I decided to have her do a still life with lemons. The lesson was a nice way for us to chat and get to know one another while talking about art concepts such as shape, form, balance, symmetry and so much more! She was very interested in drawing the lemon segments and we had a wonderful discussion about the colors we saw in the lemon peel and the shadows!

Lemons on drawing paper using colored pencils

I had her sketch the lemons using graphite and then add color using watercolor pencils. She could then soften the color by adding water (she didn't want to--she liked the look of the pencil lines).

We finished that up pretty quickly and I introduced her to a new (to me) technique I have been laying around with. We tried out this new technique using just one lemon, to keep it simple. She drew the lemon using craypas, or oil pastels, and then used baby oil on a Q-tip to smudge the colors and blend them. Boy, I remember using turpentine with oil pastels in high school-YUCK! What a smell and mess (at least for this watercolorist!).

She then used watercolor to add a wash of color to the background (the oil pastels act as a resist for the watercolor, so she could just paint over the entire image). She really enjoyed working with that medium and we decided our next lesson would use that technique. I can't wait!

Lemon done using the craypas/baby oil technique on watercolor paper