Focused Still Life

                   Yellow                                                             Blue           
                   Switched                                                          Gas
                   On            By Julia Mitford 12                             Crazy    By Paul Stevens 12

                   Purple                                                              Recorder    
                   Bottles                                                             Deep
                   Wine                                                                Purple     
                           By Tom Gemmell  13                                           By Phillipa Waddell 12

These focused still life compositions utilised ink and a mixture of dye wash and water colour -controlled colour running. Student were required to focus in upon a single object and view it from different positions building a single composition or machine.

During this project we focused on:

• doing a variety of quick thumb nail composition sketches
  before working on a large sketch,
• putting the parts and different views together to build a
  single machine or composition,
• using the whole page or filling the page,
• looking at and for the big shapes, being bold,
• later focusing on detail,
• really looking at the subject,
• interpreting what they see,
• and taking risks -not avoiding tricky parts,
• choosing colours and practicing colour blends and runs,
• learning to wet areas then drip in and run a colour,
• Learning to run two colours together,
• outlining in ink to bring the lines back out - I find biro sufficient,
  this is done after all the dyeing so that ink does not run and lines remain crisp.

Students then used their poetry and computer publishing skills to give their pictures interesting three word titles. Their instructions for this was to use three word that represents a colour, object and a feeling.