Exercise 7: Still life with natural objects

Transcription

1 Exercise 7: Still life with natural objects Assemble a group of natural objects. These could be highly-coloured objects such as fruit or vegetables (peppers make an excellent subject), more subtly coloured vegetables or highly structured objects that are almost monochrome such as shells, skulls, rock crystals or seed heads. If you choose to work with tertiary colours and subtle lines and tonal variations you could include an element that is highly coloured such as a red fabric background or a brightly coloured piece of fruit such as an apple, orange or lemon. It s best to choose simple forms rather than complex ones for this exercise; just two or three objects will give you enough subject matter. Use your sketchbook to help you to locate an interesting point of view. You may wish to zoom in and lose the outline shapes of the subject to give greater compositional interest. Notice where light falls and its varying effects on the surfaces of objects. Consider how the lightest areas appear on a shiny reflective surface. Look also at the darkest areas of shade and analyse the colours that can be seen there. Half close your eyes to obtain an overall sense of the tonal values and assess where the lightest areas are. As you saw in Part One, it s important to keep on doing this when you re painting or drawing almost any subject from life in order to switch off compositional detail and colour and concentrate solely on tonal variation. You may wish to work on small coloured studies first using coloured pencils, oil pastels or watercolours. Once again, decide on your format, scale, composition, light source and colour palette. Make notes as you go along. Assess your finished painting carefully. Make notes in your learning log on: how you ve progressed from your first attempt at still life any problems that the natural objects presented your choices, working methods and finished painting what you ve learned from this exercise. For this exercise I chose a sea shell and an orange to begin to create the composition I was after. I made several sketches of the sea shell from various angles and peeled the orange which had the effect of making it look somewhat shell-like. I sketched out some illustrative images on an A3 sheet of cartridge paper using a graphite pencil B. I also made an arrangement for the chosen composition which I sketched on an A4 sheet:

2 My chosen sea shell & orange still life composition I scanned the sketchbook pages, printed them out on A4 paper and then used Sennelier oil pastels to mark in colour suggestions based on the original objects:

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4 I took a reference photo of this chosen composition: My chosen sea shell & orange still life composition - colour ideas

5 I had already prepared a Gerstaecker 20 x 20cm square canvas board, which I think suits the composition, with a white ground and a turquoise blue/green acrylic wash. I used a neutral mix of light Burnt Umber/White for drawing in the shapes and shadows - I quite like the almost abstract feel - it s quite similar to a wood-cut or litho-print image: For my first attempt at this fairly simple natural still life composition I decided to try out chalk pastels, which I have never used. I found the blending of colours good, but noticed that producing fine lines and detail was quite tricky. Other than the layout of the shapes and maybe the shadows, what I ended up with colour-wise was quite different from the original/reference photo. My squinted eyes gave me a purply background/foreground drop that was obviously more intense than the reality of the arrangement? Having produced a canvas, I decided to shake/blow off the remaining chalk and then spray it with fixative (I used Daler & Rowney Perfix Colourless Fixative):

6 Still life with natural objects I m not sure that the fixative spray did the still life any favours - despite my best efforts of removing remaining chalk, the spray seemed to move fragments of chalk about and muddy the canvas. I should have used my portable hoover to suck off the excess chalk, and I should have taken a reference photo of the chalk image before spraying I have been tempted to attack this image with indian ink to pick out the details, shadows and highlights - but have so far resisted this The final image is kind of abstract in its composition and to be honest the more I look at it through squinted eyes, the more I see suggestions of shapes and tonal relationships as opposed to detail. Stuart Brownlee - OCA th January 2014