Wetpaint Art: 2014

lundi 31 mars 2014

mardi 25 mars 2014

lundi 3 février 2014

Monday Color Study: Frog 1h

Drawing lessons by Charles Bargue

Few years ago, some fellow artists from London came to visit Paris for a special exposition at the Musée d'Orsay. It was an exposition on Jean Léon Gérome.

I admit it, I didn't know that artist, but I took this opportunity to meet them and discover Gérome work, and I can convey how much I was amazed by this French artist (I will let you do your own research on him). Of course, after the exposition I looked into this artist biography, and I found that he participated in the making of a book, the one I will review here.

The Drawing lessons are co-authored by Bargue and Gérome. I will quote wikipedia here for some historical context: "The course, published between 1866 and 1871 by Goupil & Cie, and composed of 197 lithographs printed as individual sheets, was to guide students from plaster casts to the study of great master drawings and finally to drawing from the living model."

Fortunately for us, the book has been reprinted recently, and we can grab our own copy easily. It is a big soft cover book, not the thing you would ut in your pocket, and it is big for reasons: the plates it contains are meant to be as precise as possible to allow reproduction by art students. Most plates and drawings are quite big with a very high definition. Only a few are printed on a quarter of page, but it is still something I regret nonetheless since they are not really as exploitable as I would like.

The introduction by Gerald Ackerman provides the reader with insightful informations about the artistic context in which the creation of the book occured. It is more for your personal culture rather than for the actual drawing that you want to read this part.

The course is divided in three sections, which corresponds to the way the authors want the student to build the subject: from parts to the whole. However, this is not an anatomy book, and nothing of the internal structure nor body parts is explained, so you might want to look for another book for that.

The first plates study specific parts of the body (eye, hand, foot) and set up the rules and method of drawing. The second section gradually builds up the limbs and the bigger body parts. The idea is to understand how each part works individually, but how they all work together as a whole. The last section is a set of drawings to study, while the first two are drawings from cast models.

The difficulty builds up gradually, and you are first helped by guidelines to demonstrate how to properly and accurately draw. The approach is very academic though, and some may not like it, but the method has proven its worth. It also develops and explains how to see and how to draw what you see. Precision is the master word here, so forget the loose sketch and the doodle, you are here to be pinpoint accurate.

The appendix develops a bit of Bargue's biography and his work, but what I especially liked was the collection of classical pose sketches at the end, and the section on how to measure when drawing with a model. Both are really helpful and interesting to study.

Overall, I like the book a lot. No doubt it helped me a lot with my drawing, especially when drawing from life. I even still use the first plate as reference for the planes and structure of the eye in my studies of the portrait (I will write an article about that soon).