14-Day Beginner Series - Still Life and Floral

Hi, I'm Mackenzie Swenson and welcome back to this 14-day beginner series with the Artist's Academy. Today we're gonna be looking at the subject of florals and still life in drawing and painting. So, when I'm doing a still life, one of the things that speaks to me most about the potential within that subject matter is actually the fact that it is entirely within the realm of the artist to compose and to choose objects and things that they want in their piece. So, when you're doing a painting, you know, of a person, whether it's a portrait or a figure painting, you're very much, you know, paying homage to that person's likeness. They are kind of what you're aiming to show. When you're doing a landscape, it's very much like, nature throws a bunch of things at you and you're like, "Oh, let me try to capture one of them." When it comes to doing a still life, you get to just control the crap out of your little environment and space. And there's something really fun about what that is. And I think a lot of people, when they think about doing a still life, they, there's kinda this like trope of fruit in a bowl or teapots on a stand. And there's nothing with like, I've painted fruit in a bowl and I've painted a teapot on a stand. But there's just a lot more that you can do with that subject than maybe immediately comes to mind. So, and same with, you know, painting flowers. You know, technically, most floral paintings really are still lives, but because they're so common and popular, they kind of have their own category. So, when I'm doing a still life, one of the things that I actually like to do is think of it a little bit more like a landscape. So, I've done a number of still lives that are either in a very vertical format or a very horizontal format. And I like to think about composing, almost composing them like I would imagine composing a landscape. So, I'm just gonna show you guys a little example of a still life that I finished recently. And I don't have the painting itself here, but I do have a couple of little preparatory pieces from it. And just kinda show you one of the things I like to do when I, you know, as I'm making paintings and playing around with the genre of still life. So, this is a little study that I did for this painting. And so, it's a two-part, you know, I mean, there's this shelf here obviously, but it's all kind of a play on perception. So, I'm just gonna tape this little guy up here too. So, my process for making paintings is usually that I will compose the piece and then I will do a preparatory drawing, just to establish where everything goes and get the composition figured out. And then I'll do a small painting, a little study, and that'll kinda serve as the road map for the final piece. And then once those are done, then I start with my final painting. So, here. Is the initial drawing that I did, and so, you know, again, the kind of, I didn't have a total idea in mind, but I was like, "I wanna play with perception." I had access to all these interesting props. And so, you know, I was like, "Okay, I've got this cool, you know, old camera here. I've got this set of pipes," which reminded me of, if you guys are familiar with Magritte, the, you know, this is not a pipe painting and how he was kinda playing with perception. There's an empty mirror frame. There is this old photograph with the eyes covered and then a paintbrush, right? So, mechanical perception and human perception and this little pamphlet on the bottom, I messed around with what I wanted that to be, but what I landed on was it's the cover of this like old, not Latin, it was like one of the original treaties on optics. And kinda came together as this like interesting story, but I just wanted to create an image that, you know, played around with something that I'd been intrigued by for a long time. And another fun thing about this painting was, you know, playing with color and complementaries. And so, I, you know, really intentionally created a very like broad muted green as the foundational color scheme and then saved a really tiny little pop of red to just put on the paintbrush as a way of like, you know, clarifying a focal point. So, it's, you know, it's a genre that's really fun if you let yourself kind of be open to how you want to interpret it and use it in your work. And then, I feel really similarly about like still lives that incorporate floral painting. You know, you can do just a standard couple of flowers in a vase and call it a day, and those are beautiful. People love flower paintings because flowers are gorgeous. Like, why not paint beautiful things? But you can also, you know, paint dead flowers, paint flowers, you know, scattered on a table. Do, you know, play around with it. Let yourself kind of get imaginative with how you want to approach it. So, we've got lots of other resources for you if you want to take a deeper dive into either floral painting or still life painting here on the site. But I hope that at least gives you some ideas for how you might wanna use still life and floral in your artistic practice.