I’ve always been curious about the academic process. As an outsider looking in and seeing all the highly finished, accurate and beautiful works produced by schools professing an academic approach I felt like there was some mystery that they had discovered the answer to. As a self taught artist I think it can be easy to feel left behind or that what I have couldn’t be as good as someone else’s who has the benefit of schooling and even degrees.

Around the age of thirteen I wanted to take my art seriously and decided the best way to learn would be to copy the renaissance masters. Drawing and painting from small reproductions in books and trying as much as possible to use only sight to copy, no rulers or tools. If something looked off however I would use my thumb or the end of a brush to measure things.

When I stumbled along the book Old Master Drawing Bargue-Gérôme Drawing Course I was pretty excited. I’ve seen these plates pop up here and there across the internet and here is the complete collection with additional text. There are three parts to the course and explanations for each plate. I’ve been doing one drawing every night so far.

With the first two plates I just wanted to focus on proportion and give the plum line a try, something I haven’t done before. I can see that the use of a plum line would be beneficial for complex compositions, but for easier shapes its faster for one with experience to copy by sight alone.

Once I got to the more finished figures the drawings became a lot more interesting and I fell back into my default of drawings by sight alone. It’s more enjoyable that way. When holding the drawing over the computer screen the effect is like that of a shadow box. I was pleasantly surprised to see that my drawing was not much different than the plate.

If your just starting out with drawing I recommend reading all the text and following along as you go. And try using the plumb line and thinking about proportions in terms of angles and distances from life studies as well.

I intend on working through the entire course. You can follow along on Intsagram @Lizparkerfigurative

Share your drawings from the course with #drawingbargue

Tag me @lizparkerfigurative and I may share some of your works on my instagram page.

Originally posted 2021-12-21 13:00:52.