Saturday, March 25, 2017

Santiago

Every trimester, students at the Florence Academy complete two long pose figure drawings. This means that a model comes in every day for three hours and holds the same pose over a period of five weeks for each drawing. These figure drawings are essentially "game time" for students. The copying exercises, the 2-hour pencil figure drawings, the anatomy classes all prepare us for the model room long pose. 
This is my second long pose for the trimester. My first pose for the trimester, Susannah, a pose seen from the back, involved depicting the form through the shape of a large shadow and the way that shadow interacted with a thin sliver of light seen on the edge. This pose was seen in full light. This means that the form is communicated more through the shape of the contour and how the contour relates to small variations in value along the planes of the body as they face in different directions. 

Saturday, March 18, 2017

Belvedere Torso

The third and final Bargue Drawing for students at the Florence Academy is one of two different views of the Belvedere Torso. A well known fragment of an unidentified sculpture from antiquity, the Belvedere torso copying exercise is infamous in its own right at the Florence Academy. Completing the torso requires mastery of a variety of conceptual and technical tools used in drawing. Observe, for instance, the variety of shadows involved in the torso: cast shadow, form turning away from the light, planes in a variety of relationships to the light source, reflections within larger shadow shapes, and combinations of all of the above. Each type of shadow requires a different kind of description and different types of charcoal handling. So, here's to this rite of passage! Now I get to move on to cast drawings... coming up soon.

18"x26" Charcoal on Roma Paper, Copy from Original Cast Drawing by Charles Bargue