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
That’s Not Art, It’s Just Copying What You See!
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
Some Thoughts on the Sight Size Technique
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,
The Lazy Man’s Approach to Sight Size
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
Bargue Drawing Tutorial Stage 6: The Finished Drawing
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
Bargue Drawing Tutorial Stage 5: Refining The Schematic
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
Bargue Drawing Tutorial Stage 4: The First Schematic
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.
Bargue Drawing Tutorial Stage 3: Marking out the furthest left and furthest right points
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
Bargue Drawing Tutorial Stage 2: Making the first marks
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
Bargue Drawing Tutorial Stage 1: Setting up the drawing
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