How to Compose a Still Life Drawing

Video Transcript

"Hi, I am David Clemen on behalf of Expert Village and today we are going to learn the basics of drawing. Now that we have used the gesture drawing and we have laid out our initial concept, I did not particularly like that layout so I turned my paper because Jeffrey has such a long neck I want to compensate for that and be able to get Jeffrey and his entire head in this still life. So I am going to come back, pull in my book here. I am just going to loosely lay it out again. I am still doing a gesture drawing. Once I get the composition I like, then we can go to the shading and really get in depth with this to make it a nice piece. But we kind of have to get our composition right or how we would like to see it first before we start shading. There is no reason to shade anything if you do not like the proportion and the composition. I am going to come in here with my sculpture, going to do this. Now, I am actually going to start on Jeffrey's head on this one. And I come up here. He has got those little giraffe horns, I don't even know what those are called, but they are there so I got to get them. Alright, come in and get the nostril. See how that jaw line is there? A human jaw from the side is pretty much the same way. I believe that is called the mandible. I am just going to come in here and just indicate that. I have got this really long neck. Okay, it comes out here and then you see how the chest actually drops down to nothing where you can't see it. So I go like this and from my angle his hip actually starts way up here. Going to do this, get the knee it goes down. Going to get this, it comes in here. I have got this big chest now. See, if you were to think about it his ribs are right here in his chest just like a human, his ribs go down in there. Alright, and now I have got my gesture drawing of the still life and I can get ready to move on and start shading now that I like this composition a lot better. And there it is."