Mastering Still Life Painting
In this new four-part series, artist Kelli Folsom provides insights and answers to some of the most challenging still life topics
Part 2 – 3 Steps to a Successful Still Life Composition
3 STEPS TO A SUCCESSFUL STILL LIFE COMPOSITION
Mastering composition will really take your still life painting to another level. There’s just one little problem. Still life is perhaps the most difficult when it comes to composition because we must arrange everything from scratch. Whereas with landscape and figurative art there is something presented to us and we arrange and edit those given elements into an artistic design. Don’t get me wrong both ways are difficult and take a lot of skill and understanding. In still life, however, it’s best to have some sort of design process in place to start from because we are starting at ground zero. Otherwise, we end up just throwing a bunch of things on the still life stand hoping to find something worth painting. Once we find it, we paint excitedly hoping the painting turns out because it happens to look beautiful on the stand. Then we look at our painting and realize although the arrangement looked beautiful somehow it didn’t end up working on our canvas. It’s disheartening, to say the least. After years of my own struggles with this, I’ve developed a three-step process that helps me set up a successful still life composition every time. My process came from years of studying successful still life compositions combined with the compositional study from other genres especially landscape painting. I find that studying all genres can improve the genre that we mostly work in. When it comes to composition all genres overlap and have connective threads.