Exercise 39 Practice Sheet: Sliced Fruit

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Exercise 39 (E39) – Sliced Fruit 

EXERCISE:  Analyzing the importance of strong, isolated highlights to create the impression of surface texture

This exercise may seem juicy but this is a challenge to look at why each fruit gives the impression of a succulent produce. This 4 examples of fruit showcase how highlights can drastically alter and give some shine to the surface while being irregular to give the impression of texture. So it’s important to build up solid foundations and values, for these to look real and not resembling plastic, it will come down to how you place the highlights!

• Lemon – Variants of yellow is the challenge here. The placement of the values and saturation of yellow is what will give the accurate appearance of a lemon. The secondary challenge are the areas of the pulp are exposed versus the areas that are still encased in the “skin”. The highlights are more muted or dulled down on the skin.
• Orange – Similar to the lemon, but this one is deceivingly simple. Since it’s broken up in different segments, you would like they are all the same, but the slight differences are what will be the task to focus on and placing the highlights correctly
• Kiwi – The Kiwi introduces the challenge of including and implanting seeds. You want to focus on how some seeds will be seen on the surface while others will be lodged in the fruit affecting the visibility and clarity.
• Watermelon – The final fruit takes a different approach since the highlights are smaller and you want to depict the texture a watermelon has while adding subtle highlights. The transition from pink to green is not a simple gradient. Observe how the color fades irregularly and capture that!