Still Life Drawing

Still Life Drawing

When students have explored doing contour line and drawing from observation it may be nice to move onto doing a still life drawing that introduces using value.  It's nice to gather some objects of different heights and shapes and textures to give the students a nice variety in what their drawing.  You can place a large still life in the middle of the room and have the students gather around and draw or you can have students set up their own still life's at their tables.  Before having them start their still life drawings its a good idea to go ahead and give them a lesson about value and how to shade, explaining that value is most effective when you slowly build up darks and lights.  Give them handouts and exercises that they can do to practice how to use value to create form.  Some students will want to rush when adding value (I am even guilty of this myself) but it's important to stress the idea that adding value is a slow, gradual process that takes time and cannot be rushed.  

Supplies needed to do a Still life drawing:

- Objects for still life (vases, jars, seed pods, twigs, etc.)

- Graphite pencils (6B, 4B, 2B, B, 2H, 4H)

- Newsprint 18x24

- Rives Paper or Strathmore Paper 18x24

- Erasers

- Light tables (used to transfer contour line drawing to nice paper)

Once you get students situated in front of their still lifes have them do a few thumbnail sketches from several different point of views and encourage them to do portrait and landscape sketches and experiment with close up views of the still life instead of trying to draw everything in the still life.  These thumbnail sketches do not need to be in great detail and can just quick, gestural drawings.  They don't need to spend a long time on these because you want them to go ahead and start on the newsprint drawing.  

Students need to choose one of their thumbnail sketches to scale up onto newsprint, this will later be transferred to the nicer paper and will be their final drawing.  For the newsprint have them focus more on just contour line, value shouldn't be added until they start their drawings on the nicer paper.  

At this point encourage students to be aware of the space between objects and where things overlap.  Advise them to observe the still life and keep in mind to draw what they see and not what they think they see.  Help students that are struggling with proportion because this for the most part will be one of the biggest things the students will struggle with while doing their still life.  Also encourage students to use variety in line weight when doing their contour drawings by controlling how much pressure they put on their pencils.  When I was doing this still life drawing I tried to keep that in mind while I was doing it.  Once students have finished their contour drawings on newsprint they can now move onto transferring their image to their nice paper.  They will do this by using light tables putting their newsprint down and than putting the nicer paper on top and drawing based off their newsprint sketch.  

Once the image is transferred, students can start gradually adding value.  Again, stress to them the importance of building up values slowly so that they don't make the mistake of making areas too dark.  Some will want to blend values, but I wouldn't let them use any blending tools for their first value drawing because it's important for them to blend values without using something like a tortellini.  Perhaps later on they can have the choice to use it if they choose, but I feel sometimes blending tools can become a crutch and can even take away from the drawing.  Teach students how to create highlights with the use of an eraser and by using the white of their paper.  Some students will thrive when it comes to using value and will be able to grasp how to use it efficiently.  Others, may not fully understand how to use it if it's their first time using value, but this is ok in time they will get the hang of it and be able to use value like a pro!