Livening up Still Life

Ah the good ole' Still Life drawing. Students and artists alike have been setting up and rendering flower arrangements, fruit, and an assortment of other objects in the attempts to create a good still life. Personally, my drawing concentration has inadvertently forced me to complete countless drawings of bowls, glassware, bones, shoes, and almost any other ordinary object you can think of. You'd think I'd be better at it by now!! This lesson will prove to be challenging not only for first time art students, but for this teacher as well.

To begin, I would introduce students to examples of what still life is. We'll talk about the reasoning behind them and why an artist would want to draw/paint these scenes. The warm up/practice lesson will have students draw spheres, cubes, and Styrofoam cones that have been previously arranged and lighted. I will teach students how to use a straight edge to sight measure the distances and placements of objects. Proportion is vital in this lesson and we will spend time talking about and learning how to shrink/enlarge objects using those sight measurements. We will use work sheets to learn about shading with graphite and talk about lighting and shadow. The process of learning how to represent objects correctly is a difficult one and students will probably spend at least one full class period exploring and practicing the techniques discussed.

This lesson is perfect to follow a perspective lesson as students would already have some experience in placing objects in space. I would have an open discussion with students about what kinds of objects they would like to draw in their still life. Hopefully by now I will have collected various random and interesting objects for them to chose from. I want students to have a hand in choosing the content and placement of  the objects. We will work as a class to set up the still life in the center of the room. I will remind students of the techniques we had practiced previously and challenge them to either draw the entire scene, or focus on one section and enlarging the proportions. Students will initially draw out their still life on newsprint or a scrap drawing sheet so they can work on their proportions and placements. They will use light boards and tracing paper to transfer their drawings on to their final papers. Students will be encouraged to either use black and white, or a monochromatic color scheme when shading their final works.