Learning to See

Inspiration and practical advice for aspiring realist artists

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How a Simple Version of Sight Size Can Help You Paint More Realistically

January 19, 2016 By: Paul15 Comments

I imagine many people think of sight size mostly as a technique used in ateliers to train drawing accuracy. Bargue drawings, cast drawings, that kind of thing. But I wonder if sight size sometimes gets a bit of a bad press, as if it was a kind of self-flagellation realist artists must go through before

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That’s Not Art, It’s Just Copying What You See!

July 15, 2011 By: Paul27 Comments

How many times have you heard this? I know I’ve come across it a few times, it’s a common criticism of what we might broadly call representational work that slavishly copying what you see isn’t art. An either/or dichotomy is generally assumed between feeling and accuracy. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the how

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Some Thoughts on the Sight Size Technique

September 15, 2008 By: Paul33 Comments

Before I start, I should point out that this isn’t going to be a ‘how-to’ post on working sight size. For that, seethe step-by-step walk-through of a Bargue copy done sight size and also have a read ofsight-size.com. This is more a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of sight size as I see them,

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The Lazy Man’s Approach to Sight Size

August 17, 2008 By: Paul35 Comments

For today’s post I’m going to explain the set up for the final version of the iron painting. It’s a bit convoluted, but hopefully I’ll be able to get it across with the help of a view photos. It seems my still life set ups have become increasingly complicated as I’ve tried to solve a

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Bargue Drawing Tutorial Stage 6: The Finished Drawing

May 8, 2007 By: Paul10 Comments

This picture shows the tone block at the heel going in. It should be fairly clear here how I’m increasingly using construction lines to find the shape. These points being so close to the heel makes them much easier to find by relating them to the main points on the outline of the heel. I’m

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Bargue Drawing Tutorial Stage 5: Refining The Schematic

May 7, 2007 By: Paul5 Comments

Finally, after ten or eleven hours work across several sessions, I’ve got this plate to the stage of the second schematic drawing. At this stage, all the main points which define the drawing have been placed and joined. I can now start to get some idea of how close I’m getting with my copy. So

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Bargue Drawing Tutorial Stage 4: The First Schematic

April 28, 2007 By: Paulcomment

Now I’ve got my main four points established, I want to get the rest of the points I need to get to the stage of the first schematic. Then I can join the dots. As I said previously, I’ve marked some points on the original plate so that I can see where I’m measuring to.

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Bargue Drawing Tutorial Stage 3: Marking out the furthest left and furthest right points

April 14, 2007 By: Paulcomment

First, the furthest left point. In this drawing, it’s the point of the big toe, ringed on the image here. In order to mark this point on my drawing, I need to take two measurements: The distance horizontally from the vertical plumb line, and the distance vertically from the horizontal line at the bottom of

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Bargue Drawing Tutorial Stage 2: Making the first marks

April 9, 2007 By: Paul1 Comment

Marking the highest and lowest points In sight size technique, all measuring and judging is done well back from the easel. On this drawing, I’m working about six feet back. The position of each point on the drawing is decided on from this view point, visualised on the paper, and then added to the drawing

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Bargue Drawing Tutorial Stage 1: Setting up the drawing

March 26, 2007 By: Paul6 Comments

This is one of a series of six posts describing how to copy Bargue plates sight size: Stage 1: Bargue plate 5, setting up the drawing Stage 2: making the first marks Stage 3: marking the furthest left and furthest right points Stage 4: laying in the main shapes of the first schematic Stage 5: refining

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Hi, I’m Paul

I'm a (mostly) self-taught artist. I paint realism in oils, mostly still life. I share my work, my evolving process and what knowledge I've gained on my own learning journey here, in the hope that it might help you on yours.
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