Sketchbook, graphite, vine charcoal, compressed charcoal, and 18”x24” drawing paper, 3-5 boxes/small items
Draw a still life composition of boxes or small items, focusing on accurately portraying the positive and negative shapes and arrangement in the composition.
Guidelines
Select several boxes of varying size to work with. Use what you have. For example: a shoe box, a tissue box and a cereal box would give a variety of widths and heights and help establish an interesting composition (as opposed to three boxes of similar size and shape).
In order to focus solely on the shapes of the boxes (positive shapes) and the shapes created by the spaces in between the boxes (negative shapes), it’s important to get rid of visual distractions! The colors and the lettering on the boxes can make drawing them accurately confusing
