It seems as if everyone I know put in a vegetable garden this summer! With garden grown vegetables ripening in the sun, there is no shortage of colorful material for sketching. If you have a crop of any kind then great drawing practice is  right out your back door. We recently harvested our first crop of cherry tomatoes. I love how each one of them is unique–some pale green with a tinge of yellow, others soft orange deepening into red in the middle.  These tomatoes were perfect for an afternoon of summer sketching in the cool air-conditioned casa.  I sat my young artists down to try their hand at drawing a perfect portion of  pyramidal  produce.  (feel free to nominate me for ‘blog with the best alliteration’. )

I have two suggestions for drawing your home-grown harvest—find an interesting or unusual container to assemble the veggies in and decide on which media you’re going to use before hand and only have that material out.   For our drawings, my young artists wanted to add some butternut squash in the mix with the tomatoes. I wanted to add some okra too, but they said our okra was just too ugly to draw.

The top drawing was done in aquarelle crayons and the bottom with prismacolor pastels.

Thanks to our little garden and some summer sketching, I now have wonderful new ‘arte del refrigerador’ , and we didn’t even break a sweat 🙂