Beach waste still life

I wanted to practice still life but wanted to make it a little more interesting for me than fruit in a bow. I decided to just do a beach walk and collect some discarded waste to use and then at least there is a contextual meaning to what I was doing.

Sadly just ten minutes on Margate Main Sands and my bag was already full so heading to the studio to see what I could do.

I brought it back to the studio then laid out the whole bag on the bench and then started to play around with compositions. To get an idea of tones, I made a photograph and did a black and white conversion to get an idea of tones but missed one important thing that would come back to haunt me - the plastic and plastic bottle laying down are way too similar and I totally missed that. There is overall way too little contrast in the whole image. I was so concerned about physical composition that I missed that totally.

It probably took me a couple of hours to do a preliminary sketch with some tonal notes, still missing the tonal similarities with the bottle and plastic, and I was really happy with it at this stage. Composition I think worked and I used rule of thirds and an L shaped composition with an odd, 9, number of items although that may have got lost in the plastics as they merge into one.

Coming back to it next morning the crushed can bothered me enough to patch some cartridge paper over it and redraw it.

Happy with the preliminary sketch, I then traced it onto a fresh sheet to start the colour version.

Pencil swatches

I chose to work with a blue green palette. Quite simply I believed that it tied in with ocean colours, where this waste would potentially end up, blue for sadness at the waste and green for its connection to recycling and general environmental good practice.

I started well by identifying all the darker areas and filling those in first. However it all went a bit off piste after that with me just switching between pencils and colouring away.

Finished image

Sadly I neglected to take process shots and so there is a jump between early and finished. Overall I am happy-ish with the end result but there is such a lack of tonal variation in the large middle section and that was an error right from the beginning I missed.