While the northern hemisphere is celebrating the arrival of Spring, down here we are moving into Autumn, which is my favourite season. I love the mild calm settled weather, a crisp morning followed by a warm sunny day, not hammered with the blasting heat of summer.
Apples, pears, late peaches and all the harvest from the garden make it a delicious time of the year as well.
I am doing the Be Still class from Kim Klassen this year. This more formal structured approach to still life is new to me but I find I am enjoying it a great deal, it makes me really slow down and THINK about my composition, all the elements and how they work together. Now I have started to gather enough props to make it interesting, and have something to put together.
This months theme is Brown Paper (last month was Books) so I have combined the two here, echoing the brown paper with crunchy brown maple leaves, acorns and apples picked from my garden for this shoot.
Edited in LR using one of Kim’s lovely presets and then because there was a lot of empty space I then added some grunge textures to make it a bit more interesting.
Anyone here also doing Still Life? Got any handy tips to share? Places to get cool props and accessories?
Learning to See Light 
you know I already am lol…..still love this image, great processing. I am on the hunt for props and things. I don’t really have anything ‘chitty’ (whatever that means) but I am making a project for this weekend to mock up an old kitchen table top from some pine, find some cheesecloth and hunt through an antique store or two, I love antique stores, but now they have a NEW purpose. I also love the idea of buying big canvas and making my own soft painted backgrounds for a point of interest
I am slowly collecting props, don’t have a lot of storage space so being careful about selecting things I can reuse many times. I made myself a background using some click together wood panels which I did for under $100 and its double sided so I can paint two different colours and get extra bang for my buck.
great idea
Great processing, well done. I thought you lived up north with us Yanks!
Cheers – as per my About page, I live in NZ
Ah, well hello!
Hi! How did you find me out of curiousity?
Well, it was another blog, not sure which one.
Love this soft, moody still life…mine tend to be more solid! I haven’t done any for a while, you might have given me the prod to have another go….
Thanks Sue, its a very new thing for me but I am enjoying it a lot. It is an artform in its own right.
It certainly is!
Great to see what you are doing in this course and interested in hearing how you find the structure and organisation of such an art form. Putting the textures in to fill the empty white spaces has worked well and I like the subtle differences in the 2 fabrics as they drape across the image. Pure genius to poke that leaf up through the handle of the second paper bag. Can’t half tell that I like it can you ? 🙂
LOL I worked hard to get the leaves poking thru the hole in the second bag, I didn’t quite have enough leaves to spill out as bountifully as I wanted to. Its actually only one piece of fabric, it has two different patterns on it 🙂
The leaves still work really well and at this time of the year I’m sure there’ll be plenty more to gather for your collection 🙂 Wonderfully versatile piece of fabric!
Love, love this Stacey. The toning works well with the still life subjects and your textures are just wonderful with it
Thanks Raewyn, I liked the pairing of the dry cracked peeling paint with the dry crunchy leaves of autumn too
I’m not much for still life images in general, but I really like the way you put this one together. The fabric is a nice contrast with all the crunchy things and the different patterns and textures fit nicely together plus the shades of brown add another level to the feeling of crackly crunchiness.
Thanks Katrina, thats exactly the feel I was going for, the contrast between soft and crackly crunchy 🙂