How to Make Still Life Art Projects
Traditional still life art usually contained a bowl of fruit. Don’t let that deter you. You can make still life art projects that are much more enticing than seedless grapes, more outrageous than an orange and more captivating than an apple. For still life, all you need are objects that usually don’t move on its own. This can include everything from bones to flower to an overturned trash can spilling out its contents. You can make still life art projects using a variety of medium, as well.
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Instructions
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Think outside the fruit bowl. Pick your subject with a dash of quirkiness, a dose of wit and a dab of originality and you’ll be stunned at what you come up with.
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Arrange your subject in a fashionable fashion. Unless you have captured a still life moment in its perfection and want to preserve what you’ve found, arrange the subject in an artistic way. This could be as small as propping the garbage can lid a little more to the left of the overflowing debris or as drastic as tuning a book entitled “How to Set Things Right” upside down.
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Paint it on canvas. Recreate the still life image with a little paint and a canvas. If your painting is going to take some time, you may want to take a photograph of the image to insure it will not get disturbed.
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Sculpt a reproduction of it. Grab some clay and recreate the rabbit skeleton you found in the woods. Again, if the sculpting takes some time and you don’t feel like dragging the bones home or sculpting in the woods, you may want to take a photo. If your subject is large, you may also want to sculpt with bigger material, like marble or a slab of wood.
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Take a photo. The photo itself can serve as a still life project, as long as you capture a breathtaking, poignant, interesting or meaningful scene. Here is where thinking outside the fruit bowl really works, as a simple walk down the street can offer you dozens of still life projects completely captured by one click of your camera. Photos can also be enhanced, re-colored, touched up or blurred using a computer program, further adding to the artistic nature of your project.
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Use mixed media. Perhaps the still life you found, say, of the overturned garbage can, would be best done justice using mixed media. You can start with the photo and cut pieces of it out to add to the garbage can you’ve painted on canvas then add clay pieces of three-dimensional debris for the final effect.
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Tips & Warnings
Nothing it out of bounds and nothing is sacred. If you think roadkill makes for a good still life art project, go for it.
Some may not agree that roadkill makes for a good still life art project.
- Photo Credit Photo of someone's Brooklyn laundry by Ryn Gargulinski
