Last week, at my Intro to Pencil Drawing class at Studio Incamminati, we finished our first drawing from a plaster cast. Until this project, we had been copying drawings of casts by Charles Bargue, so this was my first attempt, in a classroom setting, at applying the concepts of abstracting a 3-dimensional figure or subject into lines and shadow shapes, and then shading the drawing, all using the techniques and principles taught in Bargue method.
As in any Atelier or Classical drawing school, we used plaster casts of several facial features from Michelangelo’s David statue. I chose to draw the cast of David’s eye. It was quite interesting doing a drawing that focused solely on just one feature – prior to this exercise, I didn’t appreciate just how many plains were present in the eye. Additionally, those plains create many shadows or reflect many highlights that are unique and common to the eye, all of which I never studied in great detail.
The cast was hung on a platform, and directionally lit with a studio lamp, which created very defined cast and form shadows. After a lesson on creating and using a value scale, we created our own using seven different values. I will admit, I didn’t fully understand the need for or use of a value scale until about the third week of the project; I kept wanting to just use my eye and “shade on the fly”. This, of course, created inconsistencies in areas that were supposed to be the same value – the right corner of the eye, the eye-socket under the eyebrow, etc. Predetermining which areas used the same value (dark light, light shadow, medium shadow, etc) made for a much more consistently shaded drawing.
Another valuable lesson was in the technique of shading. It’s evident in the darker shadows of my drawing that the shading is a little noisy – for example, the darkest cast shadow against the wall is not a completely smooth, consistent color. You can see specks of white or other lighter values throughout the shadow that make it look similar to television noise (remember those days?). The way to correct this, is to shade the whole area first with a harder pencil – 2H, H, HB, etc. Then, as you need to go darker, shade the whole area again with a slightly softer pencil, and keep repeating this process until the shadow is the value needed. This makes shading a long, arduous process, but the final result is worth it. Shading with a softer pencil first creates a darker value much quicker, but there is much more noise in the final result.
This project took 2 weeks and 3 classes to complete, and there was a lot of direction and help from Katya Held, my teacher, but the lessons learned from it were many. Our next project is drawing from a life-size cast of a bust – I’m both excited and very scared.
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