When I attended the American Academy of Art, art school, the first year you learn the fundamentals and one of the fundamental projects you have to learn is to paint still life's. The instructor would set up at least 4 or 5 still life's with all kinds of objects and many times the objects had no particular theme or relation to each other. They were set up to help you learn to draw and paint from life and probably still one of the best ways to learn to do both.

Setting up and painting your own still life is an exercise I highly recommend. Setting up the still life helps you in creating a scene and you determine the lighting and in turn, learn how to create a value pattern. You are handling the objects so you automatically grasp the shape of what you will be drawing and painting. 

A still life usually only has about a foot to 2 feet of distance but it is still distance so you will learn how to use overlapping objects to show distance. 

 

When lighting your subject matter and picking out the background you constantly need to be aware of the large light and dark value patterns so the scene will work out when you go to paint it. For instance, if everything in the still life is dark with only small highlights everywhere, this would not make for a great scene, you would maybe look for different light and dark objects so they can play off of each other. You could also have all the same color and then have another object that is totally a different color to give you that great light and dark value pattern.

You may ask what objects should I use in a still life and to that I would say any objects that you like that are in your house. You probably already have a still life set up in your house on a shelf or a table. A still life could be that book and your reading glasses laying on the table under that lamp that you used to sit there and read that book. It could be the garden tools that are laying on the table that you used for planting your flowers. Still life scenes are everywhere in your house, you just have to look then light it up really nice and either take a photo of it or paint it live right from the live subject matter. 

Have fun searching out those still life's in your home, you will be surprised how many are already set up for you to paint.

 

Finally, a great use for all those knickknacks you have collected over the years!