The Color of Cheese

I hate still lifes. At least in the traditional sense; I hate the ideas of doing portraits of flowers or fruit bowls or cubes/spheres. It's boring and learning-student cliched. Knowing this, and still wanting to understand the many dimensions of light-color relationships, I have to suck it up. Might as well illustrate something I enjoy staring at: cheese.

Actually this worked out well. There are a lot of subtle things to learn from the way the different textures/opacities absorb and toss back light and color-- The way light passes through wax, the texture patterns of the rind, holes in the cheese, etc. I learned a few things otherwise. Firstly, a big obstacle with getting the right colors has been getting the value (light-dark) exactly right. As it turns out I'm great with hue, but tend to choose too light a color and hence the contrast never quite looks right. Secondly, using colored pencils as a medium is great for perfecting the hue but not so much for working on aforementioned values. Additionally, as with LCD screens black never looks exactly black, and I'll confess that after I scanned in the sketches I digitally enhanced what was supposed to be the blacks more towards what I originally had in mind. However I promise I only modified the blacks and not the colors, and the effect is still colored pencil all the way.

These are not true still lifes. I did these sketches based on some of the photography in Cheese: A Connoisseur's Guide to the World's Best by Max McCalman and David Gibbons. I love this book and the pictures inside are beautifully balanced. For right now, since the exercise is about training my eyes to match colors properly, this works out well enough. I'm not ready to deal with shifting light yet, but will likely tackle it next.


I. Half-Wheel With Wine and Glass.



II. Standing Semi-soft



III. Wedge of Cheese





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