Watch Fruit Still Life Sculpture

Study a still life and imagine you’ve been asked to add a piece of fruit to the composition! Using simple materials from home and a few different techniques, create a bigger-than life fruit sculpture.

Collection Connection

Flora Mace’s and Joey Kirkpatrick’s Fruit Still Life was created in 1997. A still life is simply an arrangement of objects. We often see still-life paintings, but here we see a still-life sculpture. The blown glass fruit in the arrangement is larger than life, with the pear in the center standing over 4 feet high! Most of the pieces of fruit have a glossy sheen, with the exception of an orange, which appears to have a very similar texture to an actual orange peel.

Materials

• Newspaper
• Masking tape
• Scissors 
• Tissue paper
• Modge Podge or mixture of glue and a little water
• Container for glue mixture
• Large paintbrush

Questions to Consider

• What type of fruit will you create? How would you describe the shape of your chosen fruit?
• What kind of scale would you like to work with? In other words, is your fruit going to be twice the size of the actual fruit? Three times? Four times?!
• As you are sculpting, think about where you would add your fruit to Flora C. Mace’s and Joey Kirkpatrick’s Fruit Still Life. Where would you place it in order to maintain a sense of balance?
• Consider your color palette. What colors would you like your fruit to be? Your chosen colors could be realistic or imaginative.

Steps

1. Scrunch pieces of newspaper into the form of the fruit, using masking tape to keep it intact. For stems, you may want to tightly roll and tape the newspaper; for leaves, cut the leaf shape from a small stack of newspaper before taping. When you are sculpting your form, you can bunch, twist, and fold the newspaper to your preferred shape.