Foreground and background

We can apply the idea of positive and negative shapes to still life painting as we look for ways of recreating a sense of depth. Morandi played with the separation of foreground and background. The use of muted colours, strong composition and simplified shapes is also something we will experiment with.

I hope that you have had the opportunity to observe and paint a container in silhouette. It may be hard to ignore all the packaging colours that are designed to grab our attention so that we can concentrate on the forms. Please bring in any container that might be interesting for us to paint.

Together with this I would like us to investigate how shadows play a part in revealing the form of objects and anchoring them to the background. Although this image is of a cosmetics container you can see how this works in photography.