I came into the class today to find I was supposed to be drawing this. Look, I don’t do still life often. Um, have I ever?…..huh. Two. I’ve done two, one in oil, one in oil pastel. Both from over 10 years ago:
That first one is a bit wonky in drawing and the cloth is terrible. The second one I did in a class learning to use oil pastel, it was a one day class. The brown thing was a horse head, I got the proportions wrong. Spent a lot of time on that darn eggcup though didn’t I.
It’s not that I don’t want to do still life or arranged object – but I’ve never really enjoyed them off my own bat. i don’t really want to paint flowers. They are too…something. Messy? Not sure how to describe how i feel about flowers.
But there is nothing better than learning a new media than a stationary real life set up, apparently.
So I was actually pretty daunted but hey, I did a person last week, so I set to it.
Actually it wasn’t too bad. I blocked in a lot of colour up front including the background. The main thing was the reflection of the silvered vase, it didn’t really have it’s own colour, and to not make the daisys all white as very little of them was white.
Working on it…it’s literally about zooming around the whole page and flicking colour and light and dark on here and there.
And done! The paper tooth was full, it took no more pastel so I sort of finished earlier than I wanted… Not entirely happy with it but it flowed out pretty easily and looking at it now I’m happier. I did this in about 2 hours, in the remaining half hour I was bored, so I turned my easel around and did this:
Notice the second picture has more depth, though I think I prefer the light sketchiness of the first.
Three done. 7 more lessons to go! I am learning a lot about how to handle it. Loosening up a LOT.
