An acrylic still life is the most forgiving subject in painting. The objects hold still, the light stays where you put it, and you can walk away and come back to exactly the same scene a week later. That is why it has been the standard practice piece for four hundred years, and why it is a sensible place to start with acrylics.
This is a beginner's guide: what a still life is, what you need, how to set one up, and how to work through a painting from the first bold marks to knowing when to stop.
What Is an Acrylic Still Life?
A still life is a painting of inanimate objects, arranged deliberately: fruit, flowers, glassware, a jug, whatever is on the table. Acrylic is a fast-drying, water-based paint that goes onto canvas, board or paper without much preparation, which makes it the easiest medium to learn on.
Beginners sometimes assume the subject is dull next to a landscape or a portrait. The good ones are not. A still life is a composition problem with the difficulty of a moving subject removed, and the best of them carry a fair amount of meaning in what has been put on the table and how it has been arranged.
It Can Be Realistic or Loose
Acrylic thins with water and thickens with gel, so the same set of paints will give you a tight, photographic apple or a thumb-sized slab of color that only reads as an apple from across the room. Neither is more correct. Decide which one you are making before you start, because the two want different brushes and different amounts of patience. If you lean toward the second, our guide to painting abstract covers that side in more detail.
The Objects Can Carry Meaning
Historically the objects were symbols. A guttering candle, a cut lemon, a watch: all of them stood for time running out, in a genre known as vanitas. Academic critics ranked still life below history painting, portraits, genre scenes and landscape, which says more about the critics than the paintings.
You do not have to load your table with symbols. It is worth knowing that you can.
Four Kinds of Still Life
- Flowers. The most painted subject of the four, and the most forgiving, because nobody can check your petals against the original.
- Food and table settings. Breakfast pieces, banquet pieces, a bowl of fruit and a knife.
- Objects and instruments. Books, glassware, tools, anything with a hard edge and a reflection.
- Symbolic. Any of the above arranged to say something, vanitas included.
Cezanne used apples to work out how to build form with color. Van Gogh's sunflowers were about paint as much as flowers. Both were still lifes; neither is really about fruit.
What You Will Need
- Brushes. A round, a flat and a filbert will cover almost everything. Buy three decent ones rather than a pack of twelve.
- Paints. A small palette beats a large one. Titanium white, ultramarine blue, phthalo blue (green shade), cadmium yellow medium, a warm red, burnt sienna, burnt umber and yellow ochre will mix nearly any color in a domestic still life.
- A palette. Acrylic skins over in minutes, so a stay-wet palette or a sheet of glass you can scrape is worth more than it costs.
- A surface. Stretched canvas, canvas board or heavy paper. Small is better while you are learning. A 9 by 12 finishes in an evening.
- A reference photograph. Optional if the objects are in front of you, useful if they are not. Take your own where you can, since you control the light.
Acrylic Mediums, Briefly
Acrylic needs water and nothing else to get started, but three additions are worth knowing:
- Flow improver thins the paint without weakening the binder the way too much water does.
- Retarder, or a slow-drying line such as Golden Open, buys you time to blend. This is the one most beginners wish they had bought first.
- Gel medium thickens the paint so it holds a brush mark or a knife ridge.
Linseed oil and turpentine belong to oil painting. They have no place in an acrylic setup, and mixing the two systems is a common beginner's mistake.
Setting Up the Scene
Most of the outcome is decided before you open a paint pot. Five things to watch:
- Do not line objects up at equal distances. Even spacing reads as repetitive.
- Put something near the front and something well back, so the picture has depth.
- Keep it uncluttered. Three good objects beat nine.
- Set opposites against each other: large and small, sharp and soft, matte and reflective.
- Keep the main object off the far left. Most people read a picture left to right, and anything on the left edge gets passed over.
Light it from one source. Daylight from a window is best, coming from the front and a little to one side, so the shadows fall where you can see them rather than straight back behind the objects. One light source is easier to paint than two.
Then photograph the setup. The photo lets you judge the composition before you commit, flattens the light and shadow into something simpler to read, and saves you if the arrangement gets knocked.
Painting It, Step by Step
1. Start bold. Cover the white with an underpainting in something strong, ultramarine and burnt sienna is a reliable pair. Drips do not matter. What you want is a colored ground that will glow through the gaps later.
2. Look for shapes, including the empty ones. Mark out the composition with a few strokes. Watch the shapes of the gaps between objects as closely as the objects themselves, because those are what your eye will use to check the drawing. A viewfinder, a card with a rectangle cut out of it, helps here.
3. Block in and stay vague. Work across the whole board rather than finishing one corner. Big shapes, no detail. Flowers at this stage are blocks of color, nothing more. Where you want texture later, lay the paint on thick now and draw into it with the end of a brush handle while it is wet.
4. Build the color up. Keep moving over the whole surface. Shadow color is worth thinking about here: when the light is cold, the shadows usually run warm, and painting them a flat gray is what makes a beginner's still life look dead.
5. Bring in a palette knife. A knife lays a clean slab of color over the texture underneath and picks up the ridges, and it stops you fiddling. Use it sparingly enough that the underpainting still shows through in places.
6. Add a little detail, then stop. Detail last, and less of it than you think. Knowing when a painting is finished is a real skill: at some point further work stops adding and starts flattening the colors and killing the marks. If your aim was mood rather than accuracy, you are done earlier than you expect.
Tips That Make the Biggest Difference
Sketch it first. A five-minute pencil sketch settles the composition and the color plan, and it is far cheaper than discovering the problem in paint.
Keep the background dark and plain. It gives the scene depth and lets the shapes and colors carry the picture.
Vary your edges. Build objects out of shape rather than drawing an outline and filling it. Crisp edges on flat things like paper and leaves, soft edges on round things like fruit. Edges do more for the sense of three dimensions than shading does.
Learn a little color theory. Enough to know why two colors sit badly together is enough to fix it, and it is the fastest improvement available to most beginners.
Paint something you actually like looking at. You will be staring at this arrangement for hours. If roses interest you, paint flowers. If it is the shape of a pear, paint pears. Interest shows in the finished work, and so does boredom.
If You Would Rather Not Start From a Blank Canvas
Composition and drawing are the hard parts, and they are the two a paint by numbers kit takes off your hands. The canvas arrives with the drawing done and every section numbered, so the evening is spent on brush control and color, which are the skills that carry over when you do set up your own table.
Our catalog is licensed artwork, mostly landscapes, florals and wildlife, and Custom Paint by Numbers will turn a photograph of your own arrangement into a numbered canvas. Finished ones are in the customer gallery.
Either way, the advice above still applies. Set the light from one side, keep the background dark, and stop before you overwork it.
