My drawing of Bargue Plate No. 16
For homework this week at the Intro To Drawing class at Studio Incamminati, we were each given a plate to take home and complete on our own. Apparently, someone told Katya Held about my paralyzing fear of drawing hands, because, perhaps as a cruel joke, the plate I was given, of course, was a hand. And not just a hand, but a hand holding some sort of disc and bent at the wrist in a complex gesture. However, all I had to do was copy Bargue’s abstraction of the hand, breaking it down to only lines and shapes. This wasn’t as bad as I was anticipating.
It took about 3 hours on my own, first putting the plum line that Bargue used on my paper, then adding a couple plum lines of my own to establish the height. As I started to block-in the hand, I concentrated primarily on the plains and the relationships of the lines to each other. As Katya instructed, I also looked at the negative shapes created between the lines, and used them as guides as well. I stopped thinking about the full drawing of the hand, and only thought about the length of the individual lines, where they intersected, and how they formed other shapes.
I was truly surprised as the drawing began looking like a hand, despite me not really thinking of the hand at all. Of course, there is plenty in my drawing that could be corrected – the length and width of the index finger, the height or angle of the forearm is too high, the depth of the disc is too wide, etc. But, overall, it looks like a hand. Getting to work on a project on my own truly made me understand the value of using the Bargue method to abstract a subject or figure, creating its likeness by reducing it to its most basic lines and shapes.
Bargue Plate No. 16
Comments