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There were some people asking questions about drawing from references the other day and I thought that this would be a good opportunity to for me to describe the method my teacher has us working from. I’m not an expert, but it’s improved my drawing a lot over the past six months and is pretty similar to some of the ideas I see getting tossed around, but with some key differences. My teacher learned it from a prominent American atelier, and I think it has some advantages to working sight-size especially in traditional media. The sight-size method is simpler and digital art programs make it really easy to set up, but using comparative measurement lets us work at different scales. That being said, I have seen a fair number of sight-size resources online while I haven’t seen anything describing this method. If you want to learn more about sight size, www.sightsize.com and https://www.ingetang.com/praxis/bargue-gerome-drawing-course-preface-and-acknowledgements/ are both great resources.
To begin, set up your workspace. If you are working digitally this should be easy for you, but you might need to just use your screen tablet as a regular tablet if you have one of those. You want your reference and work surface parallel to your eye in order to minimize distortion from the piece tilting away from you at a table. If you work traditionally, you will need to invest in an easel. I recommend a travel watercolor easel, since you can take it to life drawing sessions, but the most important thing is to able to adjust the base to make sure it's level. Level out your easel, reference, and drawing paper before starting. You should have a light source illuminating your work from a 45 degree angle over the shoulder of your non-dominant hand so that you can see what you're doing without casting shadows on to the paper.
There were some people asking questions about drawing from references the other day and I thought that this would be a good opportunity to for me to describe the method my teacher has us working from. I’m not an expert, but it’s improved my drawing a lot over the past six months and is pretty similar to some of the ideas I see getting tossed around, but with some key differences. My teacher learned it from a prominent American atelier, and I think it has some advantages to working sight-size especially in traditional media. The sight-size method is simpler and digital art programs make it really easy to set up, but using comparative measurement lets us work at different scales. That being said, I have seen a fair number of sight-size resources online while I haven’t seen anything describing this method. If you want to learn more about sight size, www.sightsize.com and https://www.ingetang.com/praxis/bargue-gerome-drawing-course-preface-and-acknowledgements/ are both great resources.
To begin, set up your workspace. If you are working digitally this should be easy for you, but you might need to just use your screen tablet as a regular tablet if you have one of those. You want your reference and work surface parallel to your eye in order to minimize distortion from the piece tilting away from you at a table. If you work traditionally, you will need to invest in an easel. I recommend a travel watercolor easel, since you can take it to life drawing sessions, but the most important thing is to able to adjust the base to make sure it's level. Level out your easel, reference, and drawing paper before starting. You should have a light source illuminating your work from a 45 degree angle over the shoulder of your non-dominant hand so that you can see what you're doing without casting shadows on to the paper.
