Putting the Still Life Together

First mix up a good neutral tone on your palette, a mustard yellow or an orangy pink, and make this much thinner than you did for the previous exercises. With this mixture draw in your broken bits and pieces (Fig. 32). Don’t be alarmed if your drawing goes awry. Remember the objects have been broken so that it does not matter how you depict the pieces.

When you have drawn in all the shapes, then you can start filling them in with the appropriate colors of the objects, changing the tones of the pieces with different hues, as near the original color as possible. For instance, a blue jug will be made up of segments of tones of blue, a green background with tones of green and so on.

Keep each segment flat in color; don’t gradate any color within the segments. In this exercise leave all the lines of your drawing intact. Do not paint over them, only up to them, so that the completed painting is virtually held together by the framework of painted lines you did first.

When you have completed this exercise, try it again without leaving the drawn outlines in, only be careful that they are fairly dry first otherwise it will interfere with the filling-in colors.

As you will see, the purpose of these studies is to acquaint you with the varying nature of color on the surfaces of objects. No object or surface is one color throughout. Surfaces change as they move forward or back. A rounded surface changes color as well as shape.