Visual Arts Planning: Still Life

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This selection of resources helps children tackle still life in an imaginative way while increasing their knowledge and experience of drawing materials. The projects offer ways to explore a still life through expressive mark making using a range of exciting media such as ink, carbon paper, pastels and collage and include two resources that show how drawing can be taken through into a final painting in either acrylic or gouache.

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Tackling Still life for children - part 1

Continuous line drawing - a warm up exercise to encourage children to tune into their subject matter and begin to consider the placement of objects on their page.

Tackling Still life for children - part 2

Part two of this resource helps children get to grips with the tricky concepts of composition and visual relationships.

Tackling Still life children - part 3

The final part of this still life project – taking drawing into painting!

Layered colour gestural drawing

This quick and easy exercise uses four colours of ink to help develop awareness of the stages of a gestural drawing.

Exploring still life with tracing paper

This resource encourages children to tackle foreshortening and aerial perspective by drawing on tracing paper from a still life of translucent glass.

Painting on plaster, Inspired by Van Gogh

This resource shares a method for painting on plaster, with oil pastel, linseed oil and graphite.

Acrylic Painting: 'Food, Glorious food'

In a supportive atmosphere, children are guided and encouraged to explore their latent creative skills to produce a colourful still life in acrylic paint.

Still Life Inspired by Cezanne

Early Years teacher Joanne Andrews challenged her class to create their own still life composition as a response to paintings by Cezanne.

Cut paper collage still life

Explore still life composition through collage, using colours, patterns and textures taken from objects in a still life set up.

Making Mini food

A fun resource to inspire you to create your own miniature scuptural still life on a plate!

Egypt in ink

In this post children create 2d and 3d ink drawings inspired by Egyptian artefacts.

Working on black paper

Jan Miller talks through a range of painting projects using black paper as a starting point.

Graphic inky still life

This resource shares how students developed their observation and mark making skills to create charming and powerful 3d graphic images

Adapting AccessArt: Colour and Composition

Yu-Ching Chiu shares her adaptation of an AccessArt resource to highlight that colour and shape can be used to build interesting compositions.

Winter Still Life

Construct a layered drawing of a winter still life using a combination of drawing, collage, mixed media and simple print-making to create a drawing or seasonal greeting card.

Bold Autumn still life

Engaging with still life drawing on a large scale (A1), and working with soft graphite to create strong, bold and gestural work.

Still life in a cubist style

A fun workshop and a great way to study still life and explore Cubist ideas of ‘temporal frames’ and drawing ‘time and space'.

Halloween still life

A theatrical Halloween still life enables students to experiment with composition, mass, line and colour, combining mark making using acrylic paint and graphite to create lively drawings.

introduction to ink via still life

Introducing participants to varied mark making, combining the soft lines of oil pastel with the beautiful, translucent effects that can be created from ink washes.

Gothic still life

Students analyse the relationships between objects in a Gothic still life such as skulls and candles - inspired by autumn, death and decay.

Drawing with water soluble graphite

A drawing resource that helps students explore how water soluble graphite can be used to create tonal contrast and portray soft texture, shape and form.

Which Artists: Jason Line

In this post artist Jason Line shares his passion for Still Life painting.

Drawing negative space

Learning to draw the spaces in between things, the ‘negative space’, lets drawings breath and tensions between objects resonate. In this drawing activity, graphite washes are used to emphasise negative spaces.

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