Still Life Drawing With Chalk Pastels

Still life drawing with pastels

D enjoys drawing. She normally sits with some paper and a selection of crayons or felt tips and draws people. She loves to draw people. It suddenly occurred to me that she had never attempted a still life drawing before. I always loved still life drawing. As a teenager, I would spend hours drawing with pencils or pastels, copying pictures I found in books or magazines.

I came across a pack of chalk pastels in a supermarket recently and thought it was time for the kids to have a go using them. I set up a simple arrangement of fruit; an apple, orange and banana. I showed the children the new pastels and they were very interested to find out what they were like to draw with.

Delal started drawing the banana. She picked it up, placed it on her paper, and drew around it. Then we talked about the different colours we could see on the banana. Was it only yellow? Which shade of yellow? Which other colours could she see?

Her arm was resting on the paper and as she moved it she discovered the pastels smudged. We then talked about blending the colours together and she explored that for a while.

Then D moved on to the apple.

Next, the orange.

Meanwhile, R who, at the age of 24 months, has quite a small attention span, did some squiggles on his paper. He managed to find the right colours with the help of D and was excited to show me how he too could draw each fruit. He seemed very pleased with the result.