In our free eBook, Creating a Powerful Still Life Painting: 25 Tips to Enhance Your Still Life Art, two artists talk about how they let loose their artistic inspirations through their still life paintings. Lisa Dinhofer discusses the fact that still life drawing is an essential part of her work, as a draftsman and as an oil painter. Still life art is where she starts every new idea, and often her best artistic ideas come to her while drawing still life setups in her studio.

Dinhofer chooses objects for her still lifes—marbles, toys, masks, insects—that have universal appeal, and people relate instantly to them. She also spends time just playing around with the objects, letting the story or concept unfold for her rather than trying to come up with a story that really only references the objects in a secondary way.

Joe Gyurcsak uses still life oil painting as a way of brushing up on the essential methods he needs as a practicing artist. He often starts by toning his canvas to eliminate the brightness of a gessoed surface so that the pupil of the eye stays open and sensitive to the slightest color changes and light transitions on the surfaces of the still life objects he paints. Toning the canvas also makes the surface less absorbent and allows for a smoother paint application.

Whether it is fruit on a tree or dishes in a sink, Gyurcsak is committed to keeping still life painting a part of his artistic practice. Not only because of the convenience of painting in such a way, but also because still life painters grow by leaps and bounds through the work they do. And that's no wonder because all the oil painting techniques a painter uses when painting the figure or a landscape are utilized in still life painting too.