Still Life Sketch

For the past two weeks, we've been working on some still life drawings. We had an arrangement of items ranging from small statues to flowers to skulls. We were tasked to focus on one are of the entire set up and sketch out the objects we saw. For my sketch, I decided to focus on two vines of flowers and a skull. Here is how the finished product turned out.

I started by doing some rough sketches on newsprint paper until I was satisfied with my composition. Next, I moved on to the larger, better quality paper. I began roughing out the shapes of the skull the vines and the flowers very lightly. Then, I continued sketching lightly and begun fleshing out the contour of the objects. I continued to do this, getting more and more details in as I progressed. Once I was happy with the outline, I decided to start shading everything in. It got a bit tricky in the super dark areas, and I had to be careful that the flower stem didn't completely merge with the dark parts of the skull. Once I had everything shaded, I added in the folds of the fabric to balance is all out.

For this drawing, I decided to go with an "L Composition". I accomplished this by focusing on one of the flower vines hanging down from the left, and having it intersect the other flower vine. The second flower vine went horizontally and passed in front of the skull. The flowers acted as the base for the "L" shape while the skull helped weigh it down. I also used the background to help put together my composition by placing shadows. There are four shadows in the area of focus. The large shadow on the left, the shadow beneath the skull, and the shadows cast by the flowers. I did add some folds to the negative space, but I made sure that they didn't take away from the overall piece.