Setting Up and Lighting for Your Chalk Drawing

Hi, my name is Mary DAmico and I am here working with one of my students, her name is Summer. I am a private art instructor and today were working on how to use chalk pastels with the still life and today we chose to use a still life of flowers. So what you want to do is find a vase that you may be have at home, it could be any size. You could choose any kind of flowers that you would like depending on colors that you prefer. We have glass vase, it can be also colored vase whatever you would like. So we chose some various flowers different sizes and so just placing them in the vase, having again different size variations, ones that are tall, ones that are large and also of different colors, to make our drawing little more interesting. So after we have our flowers set, we are going to see where the light is best with our still life. If you have a spotlight that maybe a great way to use the light and shadow for your drawing or you can use natural light, if you have a window that you can work from. So as we have this started then we are going to get our piece of paper and again it is heavy pound of paper to hold the chalk pastel, so, we want to make sure that we have enough room and that we have clean area to work with. If you have an art smock, that would be great, so that you do not get the chalk all over your clothes. We are also going to be using any kind of cloth or tissue to get the chalk off of our fingers so that we do not blend it into another color when we are working with our chalk pastels. We want to make sure that we have our erasers and our blending sticks. Now that you have your materials ready we are ready to move onto our next step which is the preliminary drawing of the still life.