Still Life in Colored Pencil with Barbara Silbert
Drawing a Still Life in Colored Pencil
with Barbara Silbert
1. SET UP YOUR STILL LIFE (SAME AS LAST SESSION)
Set up your objects on a tablecloth, and find another cloth to prop up behind it & tape to a wall or a large board.
RE-DRAW your still life as before but on a smooth paper like Bristol or a colored pencil pad. Use a med. blue to draw with (Prismacolor best)
Note: don’t color over your pencil drawing with colored pencils – it won’t work.
2. SHADING
Begin by lightly shading the blue cloth first, using the side of your sharpened colored pencil and try to get an even tone. Then add the medium blue and then midnight blue shadows.
Start shading the pears by using a light coral for the highlights, leaving some white of the paper. Then use a red-orange for the mid-tones, and add some dark umber (brown) to the red for the left side that’s in shadow.
3. COLOR
Put the stems in with a yellow green, noting the light side of stem on right, and make a bit darker on top and left side.
For the tarnished copper bowl, use a light blue for the inside, noting how it gets darker on the inside right. Add some orange where indicated, then dark gray around it and mesh one color into another softly with your pencil point. You cannot blend colored pencil with your finger or a paper stub. Remember to leave white highlights where you see them.
4. BACKGROUND & SHADOW
Finish the dark background with the darkest blue, adding only a bit of black, and perhaps some dark red as well.
Don’t forget shadows under the bowl and pears, and note how beautiful the pears look against a dark background!
Happy Drawing, Barbara
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About Barbara Silbert:
Barbara Silbert’s work has been acknowledged with more than 50 awards in various venues. She has taught Pastel Portraiture at the Nassau County Museum of Art and is presently teaching at The Art Guild and Great Neck’s school of Community Education at Cumberland. Silbert has taught adults, children, teens and seniors locally for the past 15 years.
“Passing along what I have learned gives me the greatest pleasure of all.”
