Behind the apple: How a graphic design professor turns a simple fruit into a blueprint for seeing

University of Puerto Rico-Carolina professor Yanira Delgado has built a reputation for insisting on one deceptively simple premise: nothing in drawing is accidental.

By THE STAR STAFF

In the classrooms of the University of Puerto Rico in Carolina, where design students learn to translate space, form and light into visual language, Prof. Yanira Delgado has built a reputation for insisting on one deceptively simple premise: nothing in drawing is accidental. Every curve, every shadow, every layer of color must respond to structure.

Her new book, “Cómo Dibujar Una Manzana con Lápices de Colores” (“How to Draw an Apple with Colored Pencils”), distills that philosophy into a single object, the apple, and in doing so, offers one of the most rigorous introductory manuals in contemporary art pedagogy.

The apple, in Delgado’s hands, becomes far more than a classroom exercise. It is a controlled laboratory for understanding geometry, light and chromatic logic. As she writes in the introduction, the fruit “is not composed of a perfect sphere, but of an ovoid volume … characterized by its asymmetrical organic curves.” That sentence captures the book’s core argument: students cannot draw what they do not first understand. The apple’s asymmetry, its peduncular cavity, its calyx, its reflective epidermis — each element becomes a lesson in observation.

Why did she decide to teach how to use colored pencils using an apple?

“It is an accessible fruit with bright colors, red or yellow, and different streaks,” she said, adding that the exercises can be applied to other objects.

Delgado, an artist, architect and educator whose work merges spatial theory with visual analysis, has long emphasized the importance of structure in her courses.  Her book formalizes that process, offering a step‑by‑step methodology that eliminates guesswork and replaces it with disciplined sequencing. The manual begins with the margin — ¾ of an inch around the page — before a single line is drawn. It then guides the student through the ovoid silhouette, the placement of the highlight, and the chromatic base of greens and yellows that establish luminosity. 

“Apply a light coat … leaving the area of greatest light completely clean on the white of the paper,” she instructs, reinforcing the idea that light is not added but preserved.

The difference between her publication, which she is using in her class for the first time, and other publications is that “whether you can draw or not, you will be able to draw something very beautiful,” she told the STAR.

The book on how to draw an apple shows a choreography of colors. Orange establishes the first mid‑tone. Scarlet red builds saturation. Burgundy deepens the shadows. Each pencil is identified by its exact Lamy code, a level of specificity that reflects Delgado’s commitment to repeatable technique. The student is not simply told what to do, but why each chromatic layer matters. The direction of the stroke — always curving with the form — becomes a structural device. The shadow cast on the table is not an afterthought but a spatial anchor.

This precision is not incidental. As Prof. John Rivas, the department director, notes, Delgado’s work responds to a recurring challenge in the classroom: “The student’s uncertainty in the face of blank paper and the lack of a step-by-step guide.”

Beginners flatten objects, apply color as filler, and struggle to build volume. Delgado’s manual confronts that problem head‑on by breaking the drawing into logical phases that mirror architectural thinking: structure, light, material, depth.

The result is a book that transcends its modest subject. While the apple is the vehicle, the true lesson is transferable: how to see, how to analyze, how to construct. The skills developed here — curvilinear stroke control, chromatic layering, shadow projection — are foundational for illustration, interior rendering, landscape representation and any discipline that relies on visual clarity.

Delgado’s next phase is a photo exhibit of clouds, an object that she said has depth, luminosity and volume that also plays around with light and shadows.

“It is my hobby,” she said.