1000 Hours

One and a half-months in to my 1000 hours of art challenge and I have just passed the 150 hour mark. It has been difficult keeping up the pace alongside a full-time job, freelance work and the vestiges of a normal existence, but I have settled in to a productive routine which gives me time to enjoy both the process and the progress.

I know my materials better now, and have manufactured several guidelines which I use in my workflow for the Bargue plates:

• Start the initial sketch with a hard-grade pencil, say 3H, and work with very faint lines. These are much easier to erase later than heavier lines made by softer pencils, which tend to leave a shadow no matter how hard they are erased.
• Keep light areas light by dabbing the putty-eraser to pick up loose graphite.
• Don't over-work the dark areas, otherwise they will be spoilt by a reflective sheen.
• Don't start shading dark areas with 2H's and above, as it is hard to lay softer and darker grades on top of them.
• Keep all the pencils seriously sharp, so that line quality is tight and inconsistincies in shading (perhaps caused by the grain of the paper) can be addressed at the smallest level of detail.

I have uploaded high-resolution scans of all of my Bargue studies so far, which can be seen in the gallery. The most challenging was Plate I, 30 - Legs of the dying slave, which I made many attempts at, and still haven't got completely right. Here's the best one:Plate I, 030 - Legs of the dying slave - Attempt 4

Measured by eye, holding a thin paintbrush in front of the image and marking lengths with my thumb.

The foot is much too big vertically, I can hardly bare to look at this one again!

This is my second attempt at this plate.

This is the first of the Bargue plates in the sequence that has no initial drawing to follow. I put in my own reference lines, and put a corresponding vertical plumb line on the original. I abandoned this and started again when I realized I'd got ratios wrong.

It's the fourth weekend into my drawing challenge, and I have done about seventy hours of Bargue plate copies. I'm beginning to be more patient with each drawing, and I definitely spend much longer than I used to on the initial sketches.

I'm currently experimenting with different ways to replace the sight-size technique that the Bargue course recommends, largely because I haven't yet enlarged and re-printed the plates to copy them at the size I want to work with, and because I don't have a big enough easel to take both my sketchbook and the print side by side.

Currently I crudely measure relations using a bit of card (i.e. this bit of the forearm is 1/2 the size of that bit, and so on) and translate and enlarge the measured points to my drawing. 

My favourite drawings so far are all arms, and have all been done in the last week or so.

A timelapse video of this drawing is on youtube: 

Woman's arm bent [while holding a piece of drapery to her shoulder]