Candy Cane Still Life Drawings

This was a still life observational drawing assignment my Grade 9 and 10 students did a couple years ago. The goal was to try and draw a realistic, 3-D looking candy cane directly from observation using oil pastels. I bought boxes of assorted colours of candy canes, so there would be a variety of results. For some reason students always seem to fight over certain ones, though ;) Students definitely rushed through this assignment as they wanted to eat the candy cane after! That was, actually, the only question I had for this assignment: not what they would be graded on, not when it was due, but could they eat the candy cane after!

Typical teenagers!

First they drew the basic form onto smooth white paper. I demonstrated on my sample how to blend and add shading to create form on a candy cane. Stripe by stripe, they added colour to the outer edges and used a white oil pastel to blend it all together in the middle. Students practiced first in their sketchbook to get a hang of the technique and get used to blending with the somewhat messy oil pastels. We went through alot of white pastels with this project- I always order extra separate boxes of white and black oil pastels as we go through them quickly throughout the year.

For the good copy, they didn't need to worry about smudges outside of the candy cane,

as we cut them out in the end.

I found this interesting video about how candy canes are made by hand- it's quite fascinating and

appeals to the sculptor in me!

Once finished, the candy canes were cut out and glued onto another sheet of

background paper which students decorated however they wanted (collage, rubber stamps, glitter, etc.)

Here are some Grade 9,10 results:

Ta da!