 Sketching a still life and as the title suggests sketching, this means using the pencil loosely and not worrying if the marks are neat and tidy. Look around your home and see what objects are lying around, here I found some books, a mug, an orange and my glasses.
 In a still life it is best to try and make some sort of a mood and have the objects relate to each other. Here I was trying to make it as though someone was sat reading a book and he or she had just left the chair and left their glasses on the book. It is also best to have the objects overlap one another to achieve depth. Here I am starting to draw the mug and I think it is always best to start a still life from the background and work to the front. The top of the mug is a flat oval shape because of the angle we are looking at it.
 Now we concentrate on the books in front of the mug and notice that one book is overlapping the other so watch out for the angles and the outlines of the books.
 Most of the initial drawing has been done here and I am now drawing in the glasses, if you are drawing glasses where they are at an angle like this hold your pencil out horizontally to the glasses and try and capture the angle of them. Don't bother about the actual lens of the glasses as yet, it is the angle of the glasses resting on the book what we want here first. The orange isn't a perfect round shape here so good observation is needed in what sort of shape it is.
 Here all the initial basic drawing in has been finished now and as I look at the still life I feel that the orange could have been placed better, can you see that it looks a bit too central between the books, maybe if we placed it a bit more to the left or right of the books it might be better. The old masters would draw sketch after sketch to get there composition right and probably would have took days and if not weeks to get the composition right but here I have assembled just a few objects in about ten minutes and the composition still looks pretty good.
 Now for the shading and here I am using diagonal directional shading, diagonal shading has been used for the mug and for the top of the book and vertical directional shading for the end of the book. If you look at the photo of the still life above you should see that the end of the book looks vertical in its form and it is only the individual pages of the book which gives it another form which is across from left to right which you will see later.
 Here most of the basic shading has been drawn in and notice that the light is coming from the right and back of the still life so that everything to the left of the objects are in shadow.
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Sketching a still life and as the title suggests sketching, this means using the pencil loosely and not worrying if the marks are neat and tidy. Look around your home and see what objects are lying around, here I found some books, a mug, an orange and my glasses.
