Still Life for the New Year

It has been a very long time, probably a few years since I wrote the last blog here. It is September now, or the month of Tishrei by the Jewish calendar, the first month of the year, which also means it is the High Holidays, and the first of them is Rosh Hashanah. A good time to make vows. So I vow ... ok, I don't vow, but I'm merely making a decision to try to write more often. At least once a month...

In honor of the Jewish New Year, as every year, I arranged for my students a still life arrangement with apples and pomegranates (it is customary to eat an apple dipped in honey and pomegranates to have a good and sweet year).

Every year I choose a different technique or a new perspective. I love to start a conversation about what a still life is and about painting from observation. I show them the works of Cézanne and Matisse, for example. This time I chose to emphasize the composition in which the fruits look monumental resulting from seeing the composition through a window - this time I used 35” slides as a viewfinder. The children experienced placing the frame right in front of them and then slowly taking it away from their face. They noticed that when they hold it closer they see more then when they hold it further away. We talked about how the entire fruit may not show, depending on the distance they chose, and it’s ok since our brain will complete the missing parts. We then drew a frame on our watercolor papers and made sure these frames were pretty much the same ratio as their slide’ frames.

Afterwards, we sketched the composition that we chose with pencils. We discussed how it is best to start with the fruit that is closest to you and slowly make your way to those behind it. I showed them how sometimes you see only part of the fruit when it is partially hidden behind another fruit.  

We used oil pastels just to color some of the lines and the texture on the fruits. For example, we added some red and green lines on the apples and red and brown lines on the pomegranates. I also demonstrated how to add a few spots with the white pastel wherever I saw the shine on the fruits. I reminded them how water and oil don’t like each other and that we will use this fact to our benefit.

We then used liquid watercolor, mostly red and yellow, to fill in the shape of the fruits. Expectedly, the watercolors didn’t cover the lines that we made with oil pastels, and the white area showed really well as a reflecting light. If they wished, the kids brushed blue watercolor over the background and they were impressed on how it made their fruits pop out. Some of them sprinkled some salt over the wet watercolor just for the fun of it (and also to add some texture on the pomegranates).

The end results were stunning and the kids were all very impressed with their ability to draw and paint from observation. At the beginning, some of them thought it will be hard and they found out that when you break it into one task at a time, it is not that hard...

Here is the material list:

• fruits for model
• watercolor paper (We used 7.5x11)
• pencils
• frames for viewfinder
• oil pastels
• liquid water colors in red yellow and blue (or just regular pallets watercolors)
• salt (optional)