At the orange grove

My friend Iva and I went on a "tiny adventure", as suggested by the SBS fakulty Michael Nobbs of the Sustainably Creative fame. We spent a couple of hours enjoying the orange grove, a pocket of nature and sanity right in the heart of Silicon Valley. 

Instead of attempting to cover a large scene, today I decided to focus on a small detail and try to capture that. 

I decided to let one orange be the star of the show, with the background, the leaf shapes and the stems be the entourage that makes the star look good. I used negative painting to carve out the shapes, and added some really dark darks for the details as well as to clarify the shapes further. 

As we were looking for the next subject to sketch, we spotted a whole set of old farm equipment of which we chose to sketch this water pump. The strong shadows was what attracted me to it. The play of light and dark and the texture of rust helps pull the focus to the water pump, but I am also proud of the tiny bit of perspective among the trees and the shadows that I captured in the background. 

That was a rather fun "tiny adventure" and we vowed to go on more such! 

Materials used

Paper : Arches cold press 140lb for the orange and Arches hot press 140lb for the water pump.
Colors : Raw sienna, burnt sienna, indanthrene blue, new gamboge, perylene maroon
Pen : Duke 209 bent nib pen with noodler's ink