PAINTING A STILL LIFE
Watch Video 1: A Brief History of Still Life Painting
Watch Video 2: Painting a Still Life
The video below gives a protocol for painting a still life, loosely based on traditional practice: beginning with a dark ground and building layers of glazes.
Artists always develop their own way of painting, but this protocol is a good place to start. These traditional methods were initially based on oil painting, but changed somewhat and adapted to acrylics.
Directions, rubric, vocabulary, and teaching notes below.
Student Work
These still life studies are set up in my art room. Student studies are given below. The black and white studies were done because judging the color and value of a shape is difficult to do if one is not experienced judging the value of a color. Painting in black and white is easier and students can learn how to paint before they are able to judge the values of color.
This beginning exercise in still life painting used tomatoes. Students had to judge the value of the colors on the tomatoes. They also had to consider the negative space between the tomatoes and those shapes and values.
This still life is titled, “Pigs and the Mona Lisa,” painted in my art class at the International School of Azerbaijan.
