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, Kerry James Marshall, Vincent van Gogh, Winslow Homer, John Whalley

Reflection:

I used a controlled scribble for my still life which I would say uses Henry Moore's technique. This really helped me create value because I found that I could go really dark by overlapping the scribbles, but I could also go really light by making my controlled scribbles bigger in size and not overlapping them. It was also really fun to use the scribbles and I think the outcome looks really cool. When looking at the two (my pre-instructional vs. my final still life) , I definitely notice a difference in how I represent value. In my pre-instructional drawing, I definitely didn’t pay as much attention to the value, shading, where the light actually hits and how that impacted the shadows as I did in my final still life drawing. I definitely see improvement in how I draw perspective. My objects now look a lot more 3D than those on my pre-instructional drawing and that is because I, now, know a lot more about perspective than I did before we started the final still life. 

I think the necessary skills to do these still life drawings are knowing how to create value with different shades and different mark making. It is also an important skill to be able to look at objects and know where this value lies, whether it be the super dark areas or the super light areas. It is also important to have the skill of perspective: knowing how to draw one point or two perspective so that your objects look 3D and real. It is also a necessary skill to be able to look at your still life and pull out different shapes and to make it look accurate to size. Making sure everything lines up and all the lines are accurate is super important when creating a still life.