Latest posts by michael wilson (see all)
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Still lifes for Beginners may seem like an innocuous title for an article but the practice can yield comprehensive results. It is also an excellent way to chart your progress from year to year. Try to do five or six every year. They don’t have to be large paintings and use just common items around the house or fresh fruit, or vegetables or flowers are always a fun challenge.
What will you learn by painting Still Lifes? You will learn several distinct and important aspects of painting in oils. First you will discover what is good and not so good composition. As you progress you will find better ways to place objects in space. You will discover that there is a certain energy between objects and placing them side by side, forward or back is an important part, even a critical part of painting. You will find it helps to have large and small objects in the painting – this will add interest and you will learn about ‘scale’…that is, relative scale and how large to make things appear on your canvas. A look at Cezanne’s Still Lifes will be revealing in that regard.
The other important aspect of Still Lifes that will help you as a painter is the subject of shading. Irrespective of color, the dynamics of shading is vitally important to the success of a painting. Make sure you establish a distinct light source. If you cannot come up with a natural light source then by all means create your own with an incandescent bulb off to the side. By learning to paint from dark to light and then from light to dark is greatly facilitated by the relative innertness of the Still Life. Personally when I look back at my early paintings I rarely included enough contrast…that is, my darks were not dark enough and my lights were too insipid.
If painting a number of Still Lifes helps you improve your ability to compose a successful painting and helps you to be skillful in establishing shade then you are definitely making strides as an artist. Take a look at Fantin La Tour who produced a very large amount of Still LIfes in his career, because after all it is not always possible to have a suitable live model on hand.