Category: Drawings

I’m feeling so done with drawing for the time being.

Besides the weather has turned summer dreadful (first heat wave of the summer).

So now I’m beginning to do the Bargue book studies from the beginning. These are said to be the easiest and then progress ever more difficult.

Oh, my! I’m not so sure. The proportions appear to be off. My drawings are surely not coming close to truly matching the originals.

Hand 3 looks more like it comes from a gorilla! I’ll have to try once more another day later.

Ok between doing drawing it from a photo: first upside down, with straight lines and only shadows. It’s not as bad as I feared.

Perhaps by the end of a year doing just Bargue drawings I’ll be able to just draw these from a photo.

Perhaps later on I’ll go back to doing realistic still life, which is my passion.

I’ve never been good at painting figures. So here’s my first shot at using Charles Bargue’s methods. Plumb lines, blocking in then a series of straight lines morphing to curves. After lots of erasing I’m rather amazed.

So I started doing more from the beginning of the book.

I was challenged by on of my co-artists. That’s all it took to get me back to searching and learning. She suggested that my paintings may be improved by looking into some classical drawing classes. She said she had worked on doing many of the illustrations from the Charles Bargue Drawing Course.

Being self-taught and not very familiar with the great art schools or the more recent atelier programs I’d never even heard of Bargue. But I did find the Cours de Dessin book of 130 Bargue illustrations.

Then I found YouTube videos from The Da Vinci Initiative where they are using Brague to teach art for K-12. Wow! I went back to elementary school!

I’m having oodles of fun and discovering new ways to think about my art.

It would never have occurred to me that art this complicated could actually be simple! Just straight lines and shadow shapes and voila!