Thirty Minute Still Life

Thirty Minute Still Life
Originally uploaded by randubnick

This is a digital sketch that I started last Monday. Because it was such a hectic day, I had the idea of doing a five-minute sketch (like the timed warm-up sketches in a drawing class). I liked the exercise, so I kept at it all week, with a five-minute session each day on this sketch. I am using my Painter software's digital pastel and working from my imagination. Tonight I changed the color of the leaves to make them show up against the blue, and added some buds to hold up the blossoms. I cleaned up the background a little, and made the vase a bit more symmetrical. The five minutes was up, but I decided to check for symmetry with a grid. It was off, so I decided to crop the image to get the vase closer to the center. When I did that, I noticed that the blossoms were closer to one edge than the other. So I added just a bit more to the blossom on the right. At that point, I had actually worked on this sketch for seven minutes rather than five. Well, I was about to declare that I think it is done, but I can already see a few things I would like to fix. But we're almost there. Maybe just another five minutes. . . .