I’ve been obsessed with fruit ever since I can remember. My first solid food as a baby was a raspberry, which is still probably my favorite fruit to this day. But for this piece I didn’t want to just fill it with my own favorites; I wanted to find fruits which have a whimsical nature with interesting shapes and colors that feel familiar to people.
In the original sketch the peaches were apples, but I didn’t find apples to be a very interesting shape or color for the flat vector background. The peaches added a really fun bright pink color to the composition, which I think will balance nicely with the purple in the next piece (Vegetables). I had a lot of fun figuring out how to texture them to try to emulate the fuzzy skin and plumpness.
When making these pieces I try to create a mood, an overall feeling which expresses the focal point more than simply drawing it over and over. But for this I think what is better to represent the idea of fruit than a bunch of colorful fruit? So my focus became not just the fruit, but creating exciting colors and shapes which jump out to the viewer in a fun way. Vibrant yellow, green, pink and orange. Spiky leaves and interesting patterns. And in the foreground, a banana – the silliest of familiar fruits.
To me, fruit is all about abundance. Growing up in a climate with cold winters, we didn’t always have certain fruits available. And because we mostly grew our own fruits, we had to wait for them to come into season. During the cold winter months most fruit came in the form of frozen juice concentrate or preserves. But in the summer, all the sudden we were drowning in watermelons. In the fall there were so many apples falling off the trees that hundreds would rot on the ground.
I remember being maybe five years old and going out into the back yard to pick strawberries. It was a warm spring day and my tiny hands carefully turned over hundreds of little green leaves underneath piles of straw. I filled two large Tupperware with fresh strawberries, and I ate one of them outside right then and there. The sweet juices got all over my hands, face and shirt.
I ate so many strawberries that year that I started getting a rash around my mouth. My grade school asked if I had any food allergies and I nervously wrote down strawberries, thinking that was the cause of my rash. Later I learned that too much vitamin C can hurt anyone’s mouth, especially overlapping with tree allergy season. But I forgot completely about the document until a year or two later in the cafeteria.
One day I walked up to the school lunch line and saw the most wonderful sight: there were little strawberry shortcakes sitting on the counter for dessert. The lunch lady looked at me and said, “Are you Heron? We have a special cake for you!” My eyes went wide staring at the beautiful ripe strawberries. What could that mean? She went into the back, and when I saw what she was carrying I almost cried. It was a plain cake with no strawberries on top. “We heard you had an allergy,” she said, “So we made this one just for you.”
“Th-thanks,” I said, holding back tears. I silently ate my cake and made sure to never write down an allergy again.
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