Still Life with Grapefruit and Pears, mixed media, (28x38cm)
Alan Bickley demonstrates a healthy breakfast still life painting in mixed media using charcoal pencils, acrylic ink, soft pastel, conte chalk and gouache.
Working in mixed media
A selection of materials used for this demonstration
There is something really satisfying about creating a mixed media sketch or painting. It gives the artist an opportunity to exploit his or her creative skills.
You can choose to use just a couple of different mediums or multiple. I’ve used five, charcoal pencils, acrylic ink, soft pastel, conte chalk and gouache, altogether in my five-stage demonstration below.
Using a photograph
It’s always a good idea to take a photo of your still life display prior to starting drawing, it may come in useful later!
After I’d set up my still life on a small low table, I took the precaution of taking a photo of it. These can come in useful at a later stage.
In this instance I worked up the final two stages using the photograph because, as well we know, cut fruit has a short time period before it begins to deteriorate and I completed this painting over a couple of days.
Demonstration: Still Life with Grapefruit and Pears
The paper
For this painting I used Stonehenge 250gsm Kraft smooth vellum paper which was new to me.
I spotted it on the Jackson’s website and liked the colour. It was made with paper grocery bags in mind… It's quite expensive at around £7 a sheet, but certainly worth a try. It comes in 56x76cm sheets, so needs cutting down unless you want to work really big. I cut this sheet into four - a decent and manageable size.
Working from life
Although I had a photograph, (as mentioned above, I always take one as a backup), I worked solely from life for the first three stages, so much better than working from a photograph - I mean, why would you, when you can work from life!
This goes for everything, not just still life - figure portraits, life drawings, landscape and townscapes and so on. I realise of course, that this isn’t always possible, and better to draw something using a photograph than not draw at all!
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