Chalk Pastel or Charcoal as a medium of still life painting

While painting a still life may be an organic, seamless, free flowing form of expression for the experienced artist; to an aspiring art student, it is the culmination of a sequence of steps for laying the foundation and building on top of it. I am trying to break down the process of creating a still life  painting into a few smaller steps, that have helped me immensely as a beginner.

Setting the still life
  This is done for us by Shruti Ghatak, our mentor and teacher, at the Seattle Visual Arts Studio. The thought that goes behind the setup and the meticulous arrangement makes it a pleasure and challenge at the same time to paint it. It determines the complexity of the painting by the number of objects used, the spatial relationship between those objects, the exact lighting on the setup that creates a very dramatic light & shade effect , folds added on a tablecloth so it creates the desired fluidity.
Last but not the least, since we often use perishable objects such as fruits, flowers, leaves  - keeping in mind that the shape & forms may change as we typically take at least three weeks to finish a still life. The picture to the right is one of the setups I was really intrigued by, for its simplicity in the selection of objects and the beautiful narrative it creates.

Composition
  The first step we usually start a new work with is to create  thumbnail drawings (at least 4) for determining what our composition will be. We learnt how to use the view finder to look at a still life setting from various perspectives and angles, for example leaving more space on the left of the

canvas and moving the dishcloth to the very right, or maybe experiment by focusing on only two of the four objects in the painting. For landscape paintings, it can also be used to crop the much larger view into a smaller area. It is mainly an exercise on the overall positioning of the objects in the still life on our canvas and what elements we want to include in your work. Shruti has mentioned that viewfinders are also very helpful in determining the values to use in your painting, although I have not been able to grasp that concept in entirety.

After the thumbnail drawings are completed, we examine them and determine which one of those options we are most inclined to recreate on the canvas. I have noticed that while I do that, I keep going back and forth between the still life and my sketches, and it usually ends up being a hard decision.

Transfer the composition onto paper
 The goal of this step is to create the basic shapes and establish relationships between the different elements of the composition. It is not a time to go into any detail.This is a frustrating and rewarding experience at the same time. Many times, after I think I have got the shapes and sizes right, I look closely again on Shruti's prodding, and see that I have completely messed up on the size ratios. I always  need a few iterations of erasing and redrawing before it begins  to look close to the objects in terms of relative size and placement.

Shruti used the works of her students in the  studio wall above to explain how the same still life can evoke so many different compositions and interpretations based on the viewers perspective.

Blocking in
 Now we are ready to identify the darker and lighter areas, and with short but firm strokes block in the darker, medium and lighter shade areas with chalk pastel or charcoal. This defines the value structure of the painting. It is an extremely important step as the different values elevate a painting from a 2 dimensional flat view to a 3 dimensional perspective. This is highly emphasized by Shruti,
and I have found the process of getting the values right has improved over the months as the eyes get trained to identify differences in darkness or lightness of each object. A slightly difficult concept to grasp for me has been to use the negative space.

Developing one area
This is the part that I am always rushing to get to, and Shruti has to hold me back to complete the two steps above before starting to get into detail. This step needs acute observation of the object, and a lot of going back and forth with the chalk pastel or charcoal stick to get the right tone for each small part of the object. In the example painting, I spent one whole class trying to get the two apples to look like  spherical bodies and ended up with a lot of frustration. I was having a hard time getting the exact tone for the red apple. I believe Shruti's advice to add some blue to the underlying yellow and red finally got it to a place where it looked organic.

She has also taught us to use weight of the finger when moving the charcoal or pastel as a way to highlight each part as needed. An excellent tip she gave me while painting the dishcloth was to draw the lines on the dishcloth slightly curved, which creates the illusion that the cloth is crumpled up, and not laid out straight. Similarly for the flowers on the jug, I tried to make them follow the contour of the jug, so that the jug does not appear flat.

Connect the Dots, the big picture view
While I tend to get too focused on one area, it is a good practice to not try to complete every detail in a small area. Instead. add the next element and go back & forth between the elements to create  a sense of continuity. Shruti has always guided us to connect the  object shadows and develop the light path so that the eye can follow that trajectory seamlessly. The charcoal project below illustrates how we attempted to create a pattern of light and shade by connecting the shadows of the two bowls and making light flow through that in its own path. It also taught me how to use negative space between and around the objects effectively to bring out the spatial relations between the three objects.