November Drawing Project – Still life with ’Pots and Pans’, your breakfast table or tea time.

This drawing project is a still life project. Make a collection of a few shapes from the kitchen – pots and pans or crockery. Perhaps your coffee cup or wine glass as you enjoy drinking from it! Perhaps a setting for dinner or the tea table; perhaps a bowl of fruit; perhaps dishes on the draining board or stacked for washing up. Keeping up the tradition of taking a walk down ‘memory lane’ with the first image of each Drawing project, here is ‘one I did earlier’, in fact when I was at school, probably for my O’ Levels homework. It’s a painting of our fruit bowl – a brass one from my granny. I now have it in my own home, although with no fruit in it to hide the glorious patina of the brass. Although I can see that I didn’t quite get the right silhouette, I remember being very proud of the reflection of the base and the way the colour changed around the curved surface. Not bad for a 15 year old even though I say it myself!

EXERCISE 1 Take a look at how to draw the correct elliptical shape for the circular shape. You can see a U-Tube video on how to do this on Day 28 of the Summer Drawing Course. Loosen your wrist, hold the pencil/pen away from the drawing tip and draw from your shoulder.
Leaning to draw elliptical shapes.
Add tonal shades to the curved surface suggest the curve. Notice where the darker areas are. Try this with a liquid colour and take a look at the video below which shows you how to show the curved surface of the plum.
How to paint graded tones.
Try suggesting the curved using lines, increasing the spacing to make the surface darker.

You can also use cross-hatching or any other way of making marks to suggest how the surface gradually looks darker.

The sketchbook above was a charity shop purchase for its hard back cover and strong pages (story was awful). Each page was painted over with white emulsion paint, allowing the printed text to seep through for a bit of intrigue, more intriguing than the story!


A breakfast still life of my favourite - boiled egg and hot buttered toast! This has been drawn on on crumpled brown paper with white chalk and white emulsion paint. I felt this surface looked like a surface of cracked eggs! EXERCISE 2 - REFLECT AND REVERSE Try using a black or dark paper and white or light coloured pastel. You must allow the black ground to be the darker areas of your object and only draw the highlights or very light areas. This white teapot looks good on the black paper: the white pastel used to define only the brightest of highlights as you see below left. Then use your finger to smudge the strong white areas to create the mid/grey tones. To do this in the drawing below right, I rubbed with a circular movement around the rounded shape of the teapot and gently stroked the spout, lid and handle. Careful not to over-do it in your pleasure at seeing the rounded form develop - do remember to leave some of the shape as a pure black to make the darkest tones - yes, even a plain white object has very dark areas!

Try this idea of using a mirror to see if this makes your shape more interesting (thank you for passing this on Judith). It is surprising to realise that the reflected image is sometimes easier to draw than the actual one. Perhaps it is because the mirror image is a 2D image and we find that easier to understand? Any ideas? You could have fun arranging a group of items in front of a mirror and drawing both the object and its refelection as you view it. Note that my drawing view was different to the photo view below.

EXERCISE 3 Make a small grouping of objects and arrange them so that they overlap each other from a chosen view. Draw this group of objects with one continuous line. Try it with a thick pen, a crayon or any medium that allows you to make a continuous mark.

The drawing above was done by Jane Lemon at a Textile Study Group workshop where I set up a still life of glass objects. It was such a beautiful drawing I asked her permission to use it. The aim of the exercise was to capture the essence of the group of glass shapes by tracing lines within each object and how each one seemed to join on to its neighbour. You can probably see that Jane has recorded just a selection of the undulating lines within each object – the secret of a good drawing to be economical with the information you record in your drawing. This method of drawing can be done with solid shapes as well as transparent one. Try to give yourself a good strong light source focussed onto your objects to allow you to see lots of different shaded effects and shadows. Look for the shapes of shading and shadows as well as the actual silhouette (outline) of the objects. Lines around these shapes less well defined areas can be considered as well. The next stage in the TSG workshop was to add a mirror to the still life. The objects were placed onto the mirror so the reflections also became part of the still life. You might like to try this yourself and expand the number of coloured lines. Cross hatching has been used in this blue bottle as well as contour lines. If you feel your still life gets too complex, select a smaller area to draw. Use the ‘card frame’ method to help you narrow down your view – shown below.



EXERCISE 4 Development ideas from your drawings Select a part of the continuous line drawing and manipulate a length of wire to re-construct the line.

Use this to take rubbings from onto translucent surfaces such as tracing paper, tissue paper, tissue-tex (a strengthened tissue paper for brass rubbings, sometimes called ‘abaca’) or organdie fabrics. If the wire is a bit ‘wayward’, tape it down – bits of masking tape won’t spoil the rubbing. You can then use these rubbings to create another still life, perhaps by repeating the same shape or selecting another shape and composing with more than one.


Cut some of the shapes out between the rubbed lines and make a composition of both the positive and negative shapes. Separate the shapes and replace them so they don’t quite line up again but make extra shapes with the spaces and overlapped areas. Some of the lines were drawn with a dotted line and others were drawn with a stitched line.

Use the original wire shape within your still life composition and glue the collaged layers together. Cellulose paste was used (wall paper paste)

EXERCISE 5 Development ideas from your drawings Continue using translucent materials and cut our several shapes of any of your pots, pans, bottles, crockery. It’s fun to pretend to stack and arrange in some way with you cut paper shapes. The overlapping shapes will create more of their own – notice the darker double layers in the stack of blue cups. This exercise allows you to to realise that there are other shapes to be discovered.

This can also be replicated using a stencilled shape - see the stack of stencilled mugs in different blues of sponged acrylic paints. Making the stencilled effect slightly translucent so that the cup shapes all look as if they might be made of glass or see-through plastic. This black, white and grey drawing on the right, has been constructed from a simple linear drawing of two mugs. One mug could be traced to repeat the same shape. The overlapping spaces were then painted to suggest that one shape is visible through the other.

These drawings of rows and stacks of mugs are developments of the idea above. Use different colours, different tones of one colour and pattern to describe the fascinating ‘hidden’ shapes you’ll discover. This way of developing shapes from a still life drawing could easily be taken into a design for a textile print, embroidery or collage at a future date.