Crinkly Old Paint Tubes

I have been looking for new and creative ideas for different still life subjects and have been thinking about drawing some of my old paint tubes for months now. The older and the more crinkled, the better they look to me. I especially like the tube in the center with no label and paint residue smeared all over it. Last I finally sat down, sketched them out and started working on them. I began with two grays; Cool Grey 30% and Cool Grey 50%. I started by drawing all the shadows and crevices in these two grays only. The folded part of the red tube is currently just the 30% and 50% Cool Grey and I have just begun adding a bit of yellow which is Prismacolor Sand. It's the tube I am working on now

After I worked most of the folds and shadows in the 30% and 50% Greys in each tube, I continued by adding Cool Grey 90% to establish the very dark areas. At closer look, I realized the metal tubes weren't only in tones of cool grays but also had warm gray tones in them, thus I added warm grays. And its different because I often use only one or the other but this project lent itself to both cool and warm.

After establishing all the tones of gray, I then had lots of fun adding different reflected colors into the tubes. I see several golds and blues and some tones of red and brown. I found it easier to concentrate on completing one tube at a time. When they are all finished and I have laid in all the shadows, I will go back and complete the whole piece. This drawing is really fun and I am working on illustration board so I'm able to add many light layers of different pencils to the the subjects. I am also using Black in this piece which I normally don't use but it's definitely working in this piece to show strong darks and to depict the paint caps which are black.