If you like to sketch from life, you probably draw street scenes, landscapes, people, and architecture—but do you ever stumble across a still life in real life?

In this class, we’ll explore the idea of drawing the still life subjects you encounter in real life, using a tabletop scene in a café as our inspiration.

We’ll take an unusual approach to this subject: We’re going to draw the entire scene with just one line, never lifting our pen from the paper. This is a wonderful exercise for beginning artists to get familiar with linework. For more advanced artists, it’s a great way to shake up your style and think creatively about what you’re drawing.

Best of all, we’ll do it with the simplest and most portable of art supplies: a single drawing pen and a travel watercolor kit.

A still life composition might look simple, but there’s a lot to learn! We’ll focus on how to make the most of:

Interesting linework
Vivid colors
Dynamic compositions
Strong contrast between shapes, colors, and values

By the end of the class, I hope you’ll appreciate how rewarding it can be to add still life to your art practice to help tell the story of your everyday environment and the world around you.

Amanda Williamson

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