Eye training - a series of cast drawings

[Paul Foxton]

Here's a picture of the drawing after a couple more hours, all I've done is correct a few mistakes to the outline. The most obvious bit I got wrong is the length of the nose.

Steven, you asked me to shout out when I found myself in error, well here it comes: I've just realised that I'm not 90 degrees to my drawing board, so I have perspective on my drawing, with a vanishing point somewhere off to the left of me. The right half of the drawing is bigger than the left, or at least it will be when I look at it flat on. Does that make sense to anyone else or have I lost it?

I'm glad I decided to do these in stages, I can make sure I get this right on the next one. Being as I'm only going up to schematic stage with this one, I'm going to finish it off anyway.

It's funny, the camera was trying to tell me this all along, it's why I can't set horizontal guides across the image and have them line up on the shots, why my drawing always looks bigger than the cast in the photos. I suppose I should apologise to my camera now, but just a little bit.

Unfortunately the light is going now and I'm away for a few days from tomorrow, so I'll continue with this one when I get back.

[Steven Sweeney]

I thought it might be useful to illustrate what I think Paul has discovered about the distortion that can be introduced into a sight-size drawing if you are not sighting your measurements

[Paul Foxton]

Steven, that's exactly what I've done. Thank you for putting it so much more clearly than I could.

[QUOTE=Steven Sweeney] There

[Steven Sweeney]

Yeah, there

[Paul Foxton]

This drawing is finished now, which is a bit of a relief. Owing to life being busy (I got married last month,) and to me taking longer over the measuring, this set up was in place for a fair while, allowing time for mishaps like tripping over the easel and the cat taking a fancy to the plumb line. That, coupled with the drawing board angle distortion, makes me less than confident with the accuracy of the result, but the eye training is good regardless.

One of the main things that concerned me during this drawing was where I was putting the dividing lines between the shadow and light areas. I'm not convinced I've done such a great job of it. One session I'll think I've got it pretty much right, only to think it's entirely in the wrong place on the next session. I guess adding tone will be the real litmus test, which should start to happen on drawing four.

This one took about twenty hours I think. As with the last one, there's a fuller write up of it on my web site.

[Mischa Milosevic]

Paul:

My sincere congratulations on your marriage. May you find joy in every moment together and may you both notice many a God's blessings even in times of intensive discussions.

I see that your exercises are coming along quite well and that you are getting a hang and importance of the Bargue exercises. Each stage that you do you should notice how important the presiding stage was. If you have not made that observation you have cheated your self.

Many a artist of today do not realize the painstaking task of learning to draw. Some would rather go for the quick fix for one reason or the other, finance or whatever. All the shortcuts are understandable but what a joy it is when you get on that road to master your craft.

The Bargue exercises, when done properly, are a wealth of information. This information is essential when working from life.

One example: working a Bargue sample drawing and later using the same method for the cast will teach one not only to see but to understand the relationship between line, shadow, half-ton and light. With the sample B. drawing and in cast work if all is set up correctly gives one total control of the work area. Working from nature and natural light, especially natural light, one must have a complete grasp of the previous lessons in order to proceed at a reasonable pace.

Copy the Bargue line figure drawings, the comparative method. They in them selves have a wealth of information.

Wish you all the best

Steven:
grate set up demonstration explanation. How much pain would one endure if they did not know this and to think, Paul was ready to trash his camera. :-D

[Paul Foxton]

Thanks Mischa, "intensive discussions" - I like that.

Thanks also for the encouragement, it's nice to know I'm on the right track.

I couldn't agree more about the progression in the Bargue plates. It is, after all, a drawing course, and certainly seems to have been envisioned that way. The next cast drawing will still not have tone, but will correspond to the second Bargue plate, where he begins to refine the outline a stage further from the even-width straight lines he uses for the schematics in plate one.

I need to get back to the Bargue plates soon, because my general plan is to stay one step ahead with the Bargue plates of the cast drawings, so I get to see how he does it first.

I confess, I'm a little apprehensive of adding tone, when I get to that stage. I'm not convinced that my charcoal technique will be up to the job. I've recently started a series of small tonal still life drawings to try and whip myself into shape before I try doing it on a cast.

I have a question for those of you who have done the Bargue exercises: On many of the plates, especially in the darkest darks, I can see parallel lines running through the tone. At first, I thought that this was the grain of the paper showing through, but the more closely I look at them, the less sure I become. It looks to me like Bargue may have used these (almost perfect) parallel lines to fill in the tone blocks, followed by smoothing with a stomp or some other implement - am I right?

[Steven Sweeney]

Originally Posted by Paul Foxton

I confess, I'm a little apprehensive of adding tone, when I get to that stage. I'm not convinced that my charcoal technique will be up to the job.

You might reduce some of the anxiousness about this by not worrying at first whether the value you put down matches

[Paul Foxton]

That sounds like a good way to approach it Steven, thanks for the advice.

[QUOTE=Steven Sweeny] toned in relation to each other, rather than each to an

[Steven Sweeney]

Originally Posted by Paul Foxton

Faced with this, I've thought about matching the relationships between tones, as you describe. But if I have a deep black in my subject, and I work down from the lights, darkening everything else so that the relationship between the lightest light and the mid tones is preserved, I exchange a glass ceiling on my lights for a glass floor on my darks - you can't go any darker than black.

Quite right, but if you establish your lightest lights (which will be the unblemished white paper, or white chalk if you're working on toned paper) and your darkest darks first, and then leave them alone, you won't push either out of the drawing. Instead, you'll have to interpolate the remaining values between those established extremes in your value range.

And yes, we can't draw "light" (in the sense of that reflective surface), so we represent it or suggest it by making sure that we preserve at least some ratio of the relationship between that reflective surface and the surrounding areas. To oversimplify, if "real life" gives us a 100-value range, but for all practical purposes we simply don't have the materials to draw or paint the lightest or the darkest 10, then our drawing will necessarily lie within an 80-value range. But we preserve the ratios between the values, so that a difference of 10 value steps in nature will have to be represented in the drawing by an 8-step difference, an adjustment that will avoid the "glass ceiling" or "floor" problem. But the difference will still be convincing with respect to the representation of the reflected light.

Across the Mississippi River from my old office is a shipwright's dock for repair of towed river barges, which are metal and, so, there's a lot of welding going on all the time. One of the local master landscapists, Joe Paquet, did a painting of that scene, on a fairly bright day, and yet through his command of the value relationships, he convincingly created the appearance of a tiny welding arc -- about the brightest light you'll see, after the sun -- from a vantage point over a hundred yards away. Of course, he couldn't even begin to accurately depict the arc's intensity in an absolute sense, so he used the brightest hue he had available and then adjusted everything else to "fit" between that and the darkest dark he also needed to complete the scene.

I admire and hate people like that.