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.

The technique that I used was stippling, this type of mark-making wasn’t used by any of the artists we researched, but it is an equally important technique. I wanted to try stippling because it was unlike any of the other styles of mark-making that I had seen used by the artists. Instead of focusing on the importance of lines, stippling focuses on the singular dot, and how you can use it to form an image. This type of mark-making helped me learn a new way to look at values, by increasing the number of dots in one area, you can deepen the value of an object. And by figuring out the balance between the number of dots you should use in one area compared to another, you can make objects appear more realistic and 3D.

I think a key difference between my first attempt and my final attempt was the perspective. The pre-instructional drawing was an opportunity to play around with perspective without any structure to the assignment. I think that helped me better understand the correlation and proportion of objects. In my final draft, I really tried to pay attention to where my objects fell on the page and how they were angled, so that it all flowed together just like the still-life setup. I think that I improved my texture and my shadowing in my final draft. In my pre-instructional drawing, I attempted to capture some of the shadows that the light provided, but they weren’t very proportional or definitive. In my final draft, I wanted to emphasize the texture and shadows of objects because that made it feel more realistic. For example the coil of yarn, I really wanted to highlight the texture of it, so I looked at which direction the yarn went in different areas and tried to mimic it. Same with the shadow of the yarn, I tried to get the proportions and value of it as accurately as possible.