Still life

This project was looking into objects and the way they fit into a spacial environment.
It was also a technique building project as I was able to really focus on the quality of shading and the apperance of objects in my art.
I found some regular household objects to draw to practice showing the texture of the object through the shading for example the metallic object has intense contrast from the light because it is a reftective object. the plastic of the sunglasses is less. It was also useful to draw spacial objects looking at the formation of shadows.


I began looking at Escher. I like the illusions and distortions Escher can show with pattern and repetition. This piec e was copied by eye in pencil drawing. I love the morphing of the objects and the way the pattern is merged together.

The next thing I did was look at a live object. I this case I chose a pair of pliers. I drew it out using graphite and then painted it with block colours taking care on the shading and lighting. I repeated my image to copy the Esher example of repation. I also turned my pliers into birds where the clippers are the beak and the screw is the eye. On this theme I collected some leaves and filled the background in with these images in oil pastel to give it a jungle apperance.

I then looked at some more art history. Georgio de Chiricos art style is clean cut, intensly contrasted and almost illustrated. He used objects in his daily life, the things he saw every day. I did the same but with things I see every day and blended them into the image. i also put more of my own style in with the rough pes shading and outlining. I wanted to give the illusion of depth by making the veiwer look through lots of new windows to new dimentions of the drawing. I especially focused on confusing with shadows and impossible gravity.

My next plan was to look into scale and size of my art work. I found a match box and filled it with beads. the image of my art work is shown above. I used oil pastels as I enjoy using my in a less controlled way for big pieces of artwork. The scale was also good for using oil pastels. Making something so small this big has a huge impact on the veiwer which I find very affective.

The image above was done by carbon papering a photo I took of some objects in a box in different sizes with a spotlight shining at an angle. One was printed in a4 and the other in a3. I think this makes it confusing to look at especially with the repetition.

The image above was done by me experimenting with new materials of charcole and chalk and with space around shapes. I found it interesting experimenting with the lighting and angles to make the composition dramatic.

This then moves onto my etchings. This was a very new method of creating artwork for me. Using my own photos and ones found in magazines I scratched the shade into some plastic. The main things I focused on were allowing the crosshatching to define the line and not to just draw an outline on each object. My etchings (shown above) represent the hierarchy of life from dead to the birds then the mammals. This then leads to the humans and above this is machinery and technology which may overpower humans one day.


This is an image of my final outcome. It is black and white to show the intensity of the objects. They are all very strong and show power however although a shell can be seen as fragile it is a very strong home for a creature.
Most lines are coming out form the center giving an illusional feel to the painting.
I blended the two objects in the middle to make it confusing. A lot of my inspiration for this was from Escher work where I got my ideas of pattern, colour and shapes. The squared pattern in the back is from a mirror disco ball. this is to show the illusion of mirrors and the fragile aspect of the piece.

After this I edited the image on Paintshop pro 9 with a few different effects. A couple are shown below however the others are shown in my sketch pad.