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 an 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: 

I would describe the types of marks that I used to be controlled scribbles. These occur in multiple of Henry Moore’s drawings. This mark-making technique helps with creating value and value changes a lot. This is because it is very easy to darken the controlled scribbles; just by adding more. It is also easy to add value in light spots because it is not awkward to add a couple of marks here and there. It also helped me because there was less pressure to only make straight lines or to only make dots the whole time. This way it was easier and I could use my time more efficiently, instead of worrying whether these were lines or squiggles if I was hatching, or cross-hatching. I think that controlled scribbles make the drawing look not only realistic but add a fun element to the drawing, which in this case is just objects, making the art more interesting. In the end, I used controlled scribbles which are often used by Henry Moore and it contributed a lot to creating value and value changes. 

In my first drawing, there was a lot of shading, which I learned was not needed to create depth and value in a drawing. I noticed that the proportions are off and I learned for the final still-life drawing that you can use organizational lines to create correct proportions. Also, I noticed that for the cylinder and boxes, there are really no parallel lines or even edges. We were shown that in order to create realistic boxes/cylinders, there were certain lines that had to be parallel and curves that had to line up. I went too heavy with the pencil shading in the first pre-instructional causing there to be little value. In the final drawing, I learned that less is more in the lighter parts of the drawing and that there has to be a lot of varying values. Overall, I learned a lot in this drawing unit and I believe that I greatly improved my drawing skill.