Still Life Chronicle

In class Monday, I dove in to the necessary evil of a still life, which was made more difficult through the use of shiny materials.  Still lives are a great way for students to learn how to practice proportion, the realistic portrayal of overlapping of objects, and the arrangement of composition.  Personally, I have always liked the simple stack of boxes as a still life; you can reliably measure how the boxes stack up around each other and there are nice open planes to smooth value changes.  But I also know the value of a more complicated setup:  practicing textures and line variation, more interesting shapes and shadows, etc.  The still life set up in class today, however, was far past my comfort zone, composed of glass containers sitting on striped fabric.

Knowing myself and my type-A tendencies, I knew I would get lost in the multitude of lines and strips of highlights within the glass, so I opted to choose my own objects to draw.  Ironically, the main object I chose, a pinch pot that I had recently fired and was very proud of, was also a tough subject.  It was also shiny, with many highlights and shadows, and had a unique shape, which was hard to get just right.  I began by arranging the pot and my other element, a wooden ceramic tool, in a few different compositions and making thumbnail sketches on newsprint.  This allowed me to choose the composition that I liked the best.

From here,  I drew a bigger, more accurate version of my chosen composition on another piece of newsprint.  With this drawing, I was able to make corrections and adjustments in size and proportion before transferring my image to the drawing paper.

Since I focused on making the lines right on the newsprint, I could focus on adding value once my image was transferred to the drawing paper.  To help with this, I took a picture of my composition, made it black and white, and adjusted the levels to really bring out the areas of light and dark.  This helped me to really see where I needed to focus my attention and I had fun with it during the time that I had to work on it.

In doing this project in class, I was reminded how slow and meticulous I tend to be.  I feel as though I need to work on drawing faster and more loosely first and refining later, so I can get more done in a short amount of time.  I think I will have some students that have the same struggle, and I need to be able to encourage them to work loosely, even though that might freak some of them out.  On the contrary, I think I will also have some students who work too quickly and find themselves with a drawing that is not proportional or accurate.  With these students, I will have them slow down and really study the objects and their relation to each other before drawing the composition.