Still Life: Drawing Study

Last night's class dealt with drawing on the canvas. Up until now, we've just been doing the basic massing of shapes. However, no matter how good the massing of shapes are, you are still relying on the under-drawing of the objects to make sure that the placement/composition are correct.

When drawing the basic pot, a good idea is to draw a line down the middle of the pot. From there, you can make sure that the roundness of the edges of the pot are consistent on the left/right side of it. For this pot, the first thing I did was draw my horizon line and then a line down the middle of the pot. This allowed me to define the height of the pot. Once the height was specified, I measured the neck of the pot and drew lines where the neck ended, top of the pot ended and the base ended. I then measured to define the width of the pot. All of these lines generally form a general shape.

Once the general shape was defined, I laid down my background and basic middle color values. The hard part about this was that the pot contained lots of decorative detailing. I needed to make sure that I ignored the detailing and just made the general pot round.

Once the base of the pot was done, I added the handle. By adding the handle last, I can make sure that my background is correct around the pot. It's a lot easier to put in the thin handle after the background is done in that region.

The final portion was to layer the table so that I added more of the background color and greys to the back of the table (to help it recede). I also made sure that I added some of the table highlights into the pot. As a final push for this (I ignored the highlights, for now), I made sure that the edges of my pot contained a grey with some of the background in it. This helped "round" out the vase.