Still Life 3 - Foreshortening and Extreme Angles

This is a 20 minute illustration focusing on foreshortening and extreme angles, drawn using a medium charcoal pencil. The skeleton laid down on the ground and looked at from a low vantage point creates perspective and the body becomes foreshortened. This also makes the composition more successful as looking up the body of the object creates a strong line for the viewer to follow up from its feet through to the head and along to the second skeleton. The main focal point is to the left of the page to create a more aesthetically pleasing image. Tone is to show depth in the area behind the skull and inside the ribcage, and also to suggest the shadows cast by the skeleton to give the drawing a more 3D feel.

The sketch would be more successful if it featured the closest skeleton drawn to a smaller scale to leave room for the rest of the second one, as it is bad practise for the picture to continue off the page.The length of the leg on the right also looks off as the femur seems too long. More time could have been spent on the shading of the dark cloth under the skeleton to provide contrast between that and the light bones.

Still Life 2 - Composition

This is a 1 hour composition study in using a 6B graphite pencil. The objects were arranged in such a way that there are two implied lines; the first being the line of objects in height order from the small tin at the front, through the jug and up the bottle, the second is a v-shape from the jar on the left, through the glass bottle, and through the prism on the right. The jar and the prism create balance in the composition, drawing the viewers eye in to the centre line which is the main focal point. The object were also arranged to make sure that none were kissing. I made sure to work from a vantage point that successfully shows all these factors to make an aesthetically pleasing composition.

The high contrasting values on the jug emulate it's shiny surface and reflective properties. Tone is also successfully used to convey the form of the objects and provide depth. The cloth underneath the objects adds a feeling to depth and 3D space, this could be improved by including the background behind the top of the bottle to also contained more information instead of being a void. Where the picture area is concerned, reducing the scale of the composition slightly would prevent the image from extending past the border of the page on the left as this is bad practise. This area is also less successful than the rest of the image as the perspective on the ellipses is incorrect and distracts the viewers eye due to it's less finished appearance compared the the rest of the piece. The small tin, as the start of one of the lines in the image, is an area of interest, and is placed on the page within the rule of thirds to make the composition visually pleasing.