Final Still-Life Drawing

Essential Question: What are the necessary skills to create a convincing still life drawing?

Purpose:

• To create a still-life drawing that demonstrates understanding of angles & ellipses in perspective, along with using a chosen and conscious mark-making technique to describe form;

• To understand value by creating a good range of values between black & white to help make the objects appear 3D;

• To demonstrate quality craftsmanship and good composition skills in a drawing.

Artists Studied: Henry Moore, Giorgio Morandi, Vincent van Gogh, Winslow Homer, John Whalley

Reflection:

In my still-life, I used cross-hatching. This technique can be seen in the drawings of Giorgio Morandi, an Italian artist who lived from 1890 to 1964. The technique was easy for me to work with because I could easily correct small mistakes and easily make values darker. I felt that I had a good sense of control using that technique, and I would use it again if I made another still-life.

There are many differences between my pre-instructional still-life and my final still-life. In my first drawing, the perspective is unclear and the shadows don’t always agree with the objects. There are several details, but they’re all unimportant and I could have focused on different things. The still-life is also too small, only taking up roughly a third of the page. In addition, I used my finger to make smudges for shading instead of cross-hatching. In this unit, I have learned how to keep perspective consistent, focus on the right details, and how to use methods other than smudging when making still-lives.

In my opinion, the necessary skills to create a convincing still-life drawing are scale, knowing your shading and being comfortable with it, keeping a consistent perspective, and patience. Scale is important because if one object looks off, it can disrupt the whole piece. It’s better to erase and redraw dozens of times than ignore your mistakes and make your first line the final one. Knowing your shading is also important because it will be the most important part in making your drawing look three-dimensional and real. Regardless of your method, you should try shading small objects again and again until you are sure of what you’re doing. Keeping a consistent perspective helps maintain the illusion, and though some artists change it many times in one piece, this shouldn’t happen in a realistic still-life. Again, this is where erasing and redrawing are some of the most useful processes in making your still-life. Finally, patience is key. Everything mentioned above takes time, and you have to be patient to stick with it. Motivation often helps, and mine was getting a good grade. Having patience and a reason to be patient was very useful in the end. Ultimately, I believe that some of the most important aspects of making a still-life are scale, perspective, and shading, but patience is the key to it all.

Pre-instructional still-life:

I chose to use cross-hatching in my final, like the works of Giorgio Morandi. I chose this because it felt right to me. After trying hatching, controlled scribbling, and stippling, this method came to me easily.