cast drawings

I thought I would post a few of these drawings since I haven't had a chance to photograph anything new. About a year ago I decided to sharpen my drawing skills. So I started doing drawings of Bargue plates. I don't have access to the actual plates, but the book is pretty good. Having said that, none of these are from it. They're all stashed away in sketch books, and getting the paper to lay flat for a photo is just more trouble than it's worth. These drawings are fairly similar though.


pencil
This is one of the earlier drawings. The paper was a bit rougher than it should have been. There's just more "noise" than I would have liked. Live and learn right? You may think the nose is kind of funky too. It was actually broken off, so it's not really funky, it's just gone.


pencil
The paper problem has been corrected here. I think this one is fairly successful. One of the problems I have with the Bargue plates is the lighting. As I understand it the casts were purposely lit to minimize reflected lights. So you have a light, a dark and a transition tone which, to me, results in a flatter than necessary image. On this one I worked from a photo of the sculpture that I downloaded from the Louvre site. In the Bargue book there is also a plate of this same sculpture. At the risk of dislocating my shoulder while patting myself on the back, I like my version better.


charcoal
This is just a bigger version of the same kind of drawings, this time in charcoal.

I don't know that anyone would consider these great art, the originals are, but these drawings, not so much. They weren't really meant to be. They were meant to be practice pieces designed to train the hand and eye. Look, see, draw, then check keeping the drawing as close to the image being copied as possible. Once you get good at rendering from two dimensions to two dimensions start doing the same thing except this time work from life, from a three dimensional object, maybe a real cast. Sound boring? Maybe, but if you want to really polish your drawing it works, and if its done right it works pretty fast.