Start by looking at the work of Elizabeth Blackadder

For your own still life, pin up coloured fabric or card onto a wall or door…..Gift bags or paper lanterns work well.  Enjoy the juxtaposition of bright colours and detail.  Make several drawings in colour, selecting areas and elements and refining to explore the composition.

I am fortunate in that I have been to a retrospective exhibition of Elizabeth Blackadder, however as I’ve written in the Research category, her still lifes, where areas are flattened with large areas of empty space, were my least favourite pieces.  I therefore decided to do exactly as asked in this exercise, in the hope that my understanding of the objective would increase as I progressed.

I pinned a large bright green tablecloth on to the wall, and to this I pinned small colourful gift bags.  I chose the table cloth because of the bright colour because I thought this would help push the focus on to the negative space between the bags.  The bags I chose were gold, green, red, blue and white, some with patterns.

I began with a drawing in felt tip pen of the whole composition.  It was done in the evening so the light source was above and this helped throw deep dark shadows underneath the bags.  unfortunately, the lovely light green pen I was using for the cloth ran out half way through the drawing, so I had to use coloured pencil instead.  When I’d finished I found that the dark tones for the shadows weren’t dark enough so I went over them with graphite pencil and then black ball point pen.

Once finished I traced the whole composition and cropped it to make it a square composition.  I re did this in coloured pencil.

I felt that this was still a composition where the focus was on the bags, not the back ground, so using the tracing paper again, I reversed the image and rotated it so that the edges of the bag were appearing in the corners of the square composition.  I coloured this with coloured ink.

For the final piece, I kept this composition but made it larger; 33cm x 33cm and used rough watercolour paper and Winsor & Newton Drawing Ink.

Reflection: Do you feel that you managed to instill energy or life into the whole drawing, or does it run out of steam towards the edges? 

I don’t feel that I’ve instilled energy or life into this drawing.  As stated in my research into Elizabeth Blackadder I feel I’m not appreciating her achievements in her innovative method of using space in her still lifes, therefore it’s difficult to emulate this. I think it’s been a useful exercise for me in the exploration of composition however, and another compositional drawing using objects that I would never have considered using before.