How to Set Up and Draw a Still Life

Still life appears in the Sri Lankan art syllabus from Grade 6 all the way to Grade 13, and it appears in the exam because it is the fairest test there is. Nothing is hidden. The objects sit in front of you, the light does not move, and the marks go to whoever looked hardest.

Most marks are lost before the first line is drawn, in the way the group was arranged. Get the setup right and the drawing becomes much easier.

Choose objects that differ

Three or four objects are plenty. What matters is that they are not alike. Put a tall narrow bottle next to a low round pot and a piece of soft cloth, and you already have three different shapes, three different surfaces and three different heights to draw.

Aim for one object that is clearly the largest, one that is clearly the smallest, and something soft - a cloth, a folded paper, a leaf - to break up the hard edges. Fruit and vegetables work well because they bring a colour that the containers do not have.

Avoid glass and polished metal until you are comfortable. They are not harder to draw, but they are harder to see, because most of what you are looking at belongs to something else reflected in them.

Arrange below eye level

Place the group on a table lower than where you sit. The Grade 12 assessment plan says this explicitly, and there is a reason: from above you can see the top plane of every object, which tells you its true shape, and you can see how far each one stands behind the next.

Overlap the objects. A group where nothing overlaps reads as a row of separate drawings; a group where the pot partly hides the cloth behind it reads as one arrangement in real space.

Fix one light source, ideally from one side and slightly in front. Two lights cancel each other's shadows and you lose the very thing that describes the form.

Block in before you draw

Do not start with the outline of the first object. Start by marking, very lightly, where the whole group sits on the page - the top of the tallest object, the bottom of the table edge, the left and right limits. This is the single habit that stops a drawing running off the paper.

Then reduce each object to a simple solid: the pot is a sphere, the bottle is a cylinder with a smaller cylinder on top, the box is a cube. The Grade 8 and Grade 9 plans spend whole terms on exactly this, because a drawing built on solids will hold its proportions and a drawing built on outlines will not.

Check proportion by comparing, not by measuring in centimetres. Hold your pencil at arm's length, mark the height of the smallest object against it, and see how many times that height fits into the tallest.

Light, shade and the shadow on the table

Every curved object has the same five zones: the lit side, the halftone where it turns away, the core shadow (the darkest band, just before the edge), the reflected light bouncing back from the table, and the cast shadow the object throws.

Students almost always miss the reflected light, and it is what makes a pot look round rather than flat. It is never as bright as the lit side - if you make it too bright the form breaks in half.

Draw the cast shadow as carefully as the object. It anchors everything to the table, it follows the shape of the surface it falls on, and it is darkest right where it meets the base of the object.

Working into colour

Lay the largest, lightest areas first and work towards the small dark ones. Watercolour in particular gives you one chance to keep a highlight - once it is covered it is gone.

Mix your shadow colours from the object's own colour plus a touch of its complement, not from black. A shadow on a yellow mango leans violet; a shadow on a green pumpkin leans red. This keeps every shadow related to the thing casting it, and it is the fastest route to a painting that looks observed rather than filled in.

Leave the background alone until the objects are close to finished, then use it to push them forward - a cooler, greyer background will do more for your objects than a decorative one.

• Three or four objects, clearly different in size, shape and surface.
• Below eye level, overlapping, one light source only.
• Block in the whole group before drawing any single object.
• Find the reflected light - it is what makes a form look round.
• Shadows mixed from the complement, never from black.