Online Art School - Drawing Activities - Still Life in Pastels

In this drawing lesson, you learn how to compose and draw a still life arrangement in soft pastels. You will learn about composition, drawing from observation and pastel techinques such as rendering form, smudging and highlighting.

Pastels: Use soft pastels. chalk pastels, are similar but the colours are less vibrant and they are much more difficult to work with. It is worth paying a bit extra for good quality pastels.

Paper: You use normal cartridge paper. For a more professional pastel look, get Pastel Paper or Ingres Paper. They have a nice texture which adds life to the drawing. Computer and Photocopying paper is too smooth.

Fixative: Because pastels smudge, you will need to spray your pastel drawing with a protective coating to prevent your artwork from being smudged. Some hairsprays do the trick, but I prefer an artist's spray fixative, available from most art supplies stores.

1) Set up the objects still life arrangement. Set them up in a way that looks good to you. Some common still life subjects include -

• an arrangement of fruit
• a flower arrangement
• musical instruments
• a variety of objects (which may have symbolic or personal significance)

2) Choose your viewpoint. Where will you place yourself to get the angle you want? You can frame it with your fingers to imagine how it would look on a rectangular sheet of paper.

3) Sketch in the basic shapes of the objects lightly in pencil. This allows you to carefully erase and redraw your lines if you find you didn't get things in the right proportion. Some tips:

• When drawing objects on an angle , we tend to flatten them as though though viewing more from side on or above. This leads to warped looking drawings, so be careful to get your lines on the right angles in perspective.
• It may help to shut one eye to get a single point of view.
• Spend as much time just looking at your subject and observing it as you do actually drawing it.

• See Example, Right: Notice the circular plate becomes an oval or 'elipse' on an angle. This is called 'foreshortening'.

4) Start adding the color with pastels: At this point you should choose the style you want. You may want to render it realistically, like a photograph, but then why not just take a photo? Many artists like to leave some visible marks and accentuate the colors to give the image more life and vibrance.

• Select your colors and plan where you want each color - you don't want to try to go over one color with another or the colours will become muddy (you'll also lose the nice texture of pastel paper
• Start in the middle and work out - I like to start in the middle and work out towards the edges, so I am less likely to get pastel on my hands and smudge colors where they aren't wanted