Observational drawing: a still life set-up
Art & Design · Key Stage 3 · The School
Setting up a still life
A good still life set-up has variety. Use different heights. Let some objects overlap, so they read as one group, not a scattered line. Use interesting light too: one light source from one side creates clear shadow, and shadow helps show form. Avoid lining everything up flat, facing the viewer. Overlap and varied height give a drawing far more to work with.
Draw what you see, not what you know
A round rim, seen at an angle, looks like an ELLIPSE, not a circle. This is true even though you know the rim is round. Drawing the circle you know, rather than the ellipse you actually see, is the single most common beginner mistake in observational drawing. Keep checking: does this line match what is truly in front of me? Or does it match what I simply expect to be there?
Using negative space to check accuracy
NEGATIVE SPACE is the empty space AROUND and BETWEEN objects, not the objects themselves. Drawing the shape of the gap between two objects, rather than the objects directly, is often more accurate. It is easier to spot when an empty shape looks wrong than when a familiar object does. You have fewer fixed ideas about what an empty gap "should" look like.
Hold a pencil at arm's length. Use it to measure one part of an object against another — say, the height of a jug against its width. If the jug is truly one and a half pencil-widths tall, but your drawing shows it clearly wider than it is tall, the proportion is wrong. This is true whatever the individual shapes look like on their own. This measuring trick catches errors that "just looking" tends to miss. It removes guesswork from the comparison. The pencil either matches what is really there, or it does not. There is nothing left to assume.