How to do a Bargue drawing: Lesson 1

0:00 hello everybody and welcome to the atelier tier we're going to be working on our first project which is a kind of first term introductory course that you would uh that you would take coming into the academy on your first day these are going to be the level of kind of concepts that we're going to be dealing with it is going to be the barg plate of the psyche of napoli the first thing that we notice right is is actually that this is not really necessarily a naturalistic looking face we can see even from the simplicity of the nose i mean look at the angles on this right there's barely an angle breaking between them it's almost like a face that has been in a sense simplified and you could understand then why it's a perfect choice for our first barg because we want to get into maybe something that is not too filled to the brim with

0:46 detail because we're focused on things like how do we define and understand and recognize well a shadow shape how do we get into these little intermediate areas like this and understand how we categorize that and how we create shapes from that observations i've talked before about the use of an envelope shape right an envelope shape is essentially a 2d concept where we are going to focus our attention only on the contours of a subject but you can see here that that there are a lot of spaces actually outside or even much further inside the envelope shape and i did that of course very purposefully as you will do this very purposefully in your own block-ins because you have to understand that at a certain point it's important for you to

1:32 extract from your subject what you need not necessarily just follow what is there and while this seems like it's not much to say it's the beginning of a process or beginning of your understanding how to edit the subject that you're seeing in order to suit the stage of the drawing that you're in the next thing that i want to bring up is the biggest deal in terms of deals that we're dealing with in this in this project right so we're after the understanding of a shadow shape we've talked a lot about and a lot of my other course is about shadow and light and this is no no different right but what you're supposed to be kind of taking away from this is a way or a process or a method by

2:19 which you can recognize a shadow shape i know that seems like because it's visual it should be immediately apparent but in fact the way that you see a shadow shape today is not going to reflect the way that you see a shadow shape and the way that you define a shadow shape after practicing this method i don't know for how long but let's say for for several drawings every time that you make a drawing with this concept in mind you're going to deepen your capacity to understand illustrate recognize and use shadow shapes as a tool to aid in your representation of a subject chinme prakash is saying so our first step should be to make the envelope shape with a limited number of lines exactly and that's what i'm going to do here i'm just going to go ahead and kind

3:04 of start out by indicating the kind of top and bottom of the drawing right now again it is it is important that it's kind of done in relationship to your uh your plumb line so the lowest point on um on the the drawing that i'm making is actually a little bit like further over from this right so the lowest point is here so in fact you know when i'm looking at my at my source image where that bottom edge kind of crosses the plumb line is actually a little bit further further over it's a little bit further up a little bit further over so i'm going to go ahead and just make an indication that there all this is here to do is just to give you your kind of first set of

3:50 proportions right then i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to choose roughly a position for the left and right i'm going to choose that in relationship to basically where the kind of widest aspects more or less of the subject are now between the base and the head we have kind of two widest points right we have kind of a widest point out here and we also have kind of a widest point up here and the interesting thing kind of about that is that we need to we need to kind of place both of those right um and you can start out with something really really approximate maybe not worry too much about

4:37 about being perfect at this stage again remember that like in this moment what we're really trying to do is just to get a very general idea of the subject let me just mention briefly right so you can see now and this is this is the power of a really cool block-in or really cool envelope shape you can almost get a sense already that this is recognizably the subject right if you look at the the psyche of napoli and you look at this uh um or at least this barg and and you look at this drawing you can say that in a way they're quite recognizable you can almost get a sense actually of the of the gesture that's kind of running through here right so there's these kind of these loose adaptations or these loose representations of the

5:23 subject inside here that are going to help you to kind of recognize what your what your drawing is kind of all about i'm going to go ahead and just indicate you know the first aspect of shadow that we're going to deal with here now usually like i would i would probably wait a little bit longer to um to indicate the first shadow edge but i want to also tell you that that that this is a very fluid process and if you're doing it right there's like a lot of different ways that you can that you can interpret this process right so again you can really see how

6:09 recognizable it starts to become as we kind of simplify these shapes create this simple dichotomy as i said before like you know usually when i'm kind of talking and demoing and stuff i tend to like measure a little bit less so i know that i'm going to be slightly less precise as i move through this but i'm i think i'm going to start kind of adding a few more things to this uh just so that you know time doesn't drag and that we get uh some good demonstration out of it so where we're at in the drawing right now uh again still just kind of making a very complex envelope shape that has uh basically kind of a third contour so we have like one contour we have a second contour we have kind of a third contour that is the uh the shadow edge that kind of runs through it um and i'm using all these points to

6:55 kind of compare various heights like uh the for instance the edge of the light shape of the cheekbone here turns just basically on my horizontal axis so i'm just trying to make sure that that kind of lines up with where everything else is lining up on that level so i'm just noticing a few things as i go that are incorrect that are inaccurate and i'm just trying to change those this is our first best guess as to the proportions and arrangement of kind of the design in this drawing what we're going to do now is just put in a very basic relatively uniform value

7:40 within the shadows what i want you to notice is actually the speed at which i go through and and put my value in right so i'm a big believer that with a good sharp pencil you should be able to actually just with your pencil lay in a relatively even value notice i'm not doing it like this where there's these giant gaps in between what i'm drawing i'm taking my my time uh laterally right from left to right to actually go through and make sure i'm creating a relatively even tone so it seems like this is pretty even right well let's do the squint test right so i'm going to squint down and look at this and i'm i'm going to look in the shadow for what i would call kind of aberrant values so areas where it's too dark or

8:26 areas where it's too light now it might seem like it's relatively even but with my kneaded eraser i'm going to pick out a few of the areas which seem to me to be a little bit too dark now this is where you can ask yourselves the question is stephen crazy like why is he bothering to do this well i think so much about drawing is about consistency and discipline which i mean let's be honest it doesn't sound fun but i would say to you then i don't think that i necessarily find drawing fun i find it rewarding and i think if

9:12 you're used to any craft that you'll understand that rewarding and fun are two very different things and they have very different sensations and therefore i think different practices that take you to that place i find it rewarding because if i apply myself over time i come to a result that suits my vision with your stump also i want to i want you to be like aware that you don't want to like stump this to death the reason being is that it's not actually important that this is perfectly smooth and even right now it's important that at the end of the drawing it's perfectly smooth and even

10:00 and even then you still don't want it to be like totally flat and like looking like airbrushed because that's really not not at all how your subject looks it's not really how reality looks and what i'm going to go through now i'm going to grab my 0.3 millimeter with a with a probably b lead in it and i'm going to go over those shadow edges i'm just going to push them a little bit harder get a little bit darker value along that edge while still maintaining a little bit of a kind of a transitional edge like i don't want listen like nothing in here should be super sharp you know you want to keep a little bit of air in that edge you know right you notice i didn't just like fill in the the value

10:47 up here and then start kind of working on these edges i filled in the value everywhere and ideally what would happen now is about all the time in the world i would actually go through and i'd start to kind of look and observe and go you know check my alignments again to make sure things are kind of lining up the way that uh the way that they should like you know taking a look for instance at you know the the edge of this shadow here and and this i want to see do they actually line up in the right way am i correct about that i'm not actually i'm far from correct so that means i need to probably push this out a little bit i think i probably need to bring this in a little bit so just by kind of like advancing

11:32 the level a little bit i need to like go all the way over again right all the things that i this is going to sound frustrating but all the things that i thought were going just fine now i need to reevaluate which again is it's really just part of the plan like that's that's the way it's kind of supposed to work what i'm going to do is i'm just going to start to add a little bit more complexity into these shapes while staying true to the bigger shapes that i've observed while keeping things very much defined in straight lines so this is a decent idea of like how you can start to

12:19 kind of carve out new shapes i think that's important to kind of talk about uh because necessarily you know you're going to have to get into that that territory that that shape complexity we can only stay like totally simple for so long before we we start to need to do this um but what i'm doing basically is i'm separating the values within the shadow into two separate values right so what i want to show is a little bit the variation or essentially the reflected light which gives the shadows just a little bit of form but yeah just to to wrap up for everybody uh this is you know hopefully what your your barg exercise is going to look like as you kind of push forward with it remember you're just going to keep kind

13:05 of darkening and unifying your shadows try to be subtle in here and try to kind of control your edges notice like that in here my indications are not with sharp edges even out here they are not totally sharp it's not so we get to like contours like this that you really get realistically quite like sharp edges and kind of hold back on those maybe for as long as you can because a hard edge does like lock you into a decision hello everybody and welcome to the group critique for the atelier tier project number one we were working on the psyche of napoli i tried to pace out these slides in a way that that addresses the different stages that the drawing is going to go through so the first slides are going to be related to problems that you face maybe in that initial stage right and as such

13:51 these are going to be problems that are related to proportion construction and and measurement so starting out with uh with these two drawings right here the first thing that we notice about these is the vast difference not only in the proportion in between the two of them but also in between uh both of them as a group and our kind of primary source of inspiration here the uh the psyche of napoli by by charles bark and really you know in a way maybe i say it's like a simple solution it's not an easy solution but it basically boils down to where you spent your time and effort you know here we have actually in both of them like a really good concept of shadow shaped light shape right we kind of see those two groups represented quite clearly however uh

14:36 that difference in size and difference in kind of construction uh leaves us with a picture that only has so high a ceiling here what we basically needed is more time spent when the drawing actually looked much simpler i've drawn for you guys a few times kind of the the idea of an envelope shape i'm going to break it down a little bit further here and just say that you know that envelope shape is really meant to just represent the idea that that you can kind of simplify something right that you can take something and bring it down to its kind of base elements but perhaps in doing so it also obscures the fact that that the envelope shape maybe doesn't need to stop at just the outline of the subject right so if we

15:23 have that same envelope shape concept and we start to connect that together say like in a situation where we have structural symmetry within the subject we start to to look at that as well right and we start to then also look at you know a constructive sense of volume inside the subject we can really start to uh what's the word like make a lot of effective choices like in that early stage before we get to a place where we're using like value to kind of express the subject i brought up these two drawings here and here which i think are really good efforts at kind of getting this bar into place but they do share one kind of common problem in between the two and that is a matter of kind of oversimplification this is going to

16:08 sound uh really challenging because i'm always telling people like from jump street hey we've got to simplify right we can't just take what we have and and just like a grid photo realist drawing go ahead and just render through from quadrant to quadrant we need to see the big picture and that means simplification at every stage now when we say oversimplified what i mean is really quite specific i don't mean the in a sense that the subject is lacking in some kind of overall view but rather it's missing certain components here what do we have we have represented really well the shadow shape light shape the part that i find to be a little bit oversimplified comes down here to the edges in between

16:55 shadow and light these of course i think are are two really proficient bargs you know we can see really well that the attention to that kind of unity of shadow is is paid really clearly probably a little bit more so in this one than in this one i think we have probably some areas here that are maybe a little bit too light and i'll point out in a moment just where and why i kind of think that is but also maybe we have in this one the sense of like this would be a good example of of what i think is like a good use of values but probably a little bit too much stump in the application i brought in these drawings because i think they reflect in a way some of the more ideal drawing that kind of came in and i want to talk about why that is so much of teaching and so much of self-critique can feel like it should come from a

17:40 place of criticism that we say this is wrong this is not working but i think in fact that we really need to also be affirmative in terms of looking at what is happening what is working and why that's working in fact these are really valuable things because those are the things that you want to take out and carry forward into your next drawing let's look at an area like this we can see again just pointing out you know these commonalities here we see really clearly those angle breaks this one's really interesting too because it's a little bit softer a little bit of a different technical application but we really still find that same idea present that we sent an analytical drafts person looking at angle breaks but also keeping them kind of soft enough so really really good job in in doing that task that though is simple to describe is

18:25 very maybe challenging to kind of keep all in your head at the same time another place that i wanted to point out was this in the sense that this artist here has focused on creating the kind of gradient or kind of boundary in between shadow light or between shadow and light that is commiserated with its kind of the the definition of the form that is passing over but not really obsessed over how to create the smoothest transition that you can create we have clear hatch marks here however when we squint down and we look at uh this subject in front of us here and we look at our subject over here we find a very similar impression in between the two there's no kind of broken transitions here and that's going to be it for the group critique i really enjoy the questions you all had i hope that you got a lot out of the

19:11 experience i want you to take your drawings out i want you to look at them and ask questions of them right look at your edge hierarchy look at your value hierarchy look at the block in and and basically what kind of big angles you left behind and whether you feel confident about those still get a fresh eye just kind of reassess whether or not it means that you work on that drawing a little bit more that you push yourself a little bit further to me it doesn't matter you've gone through the process you've worked on shadow shapes you've moved through the stages you've extracted something from this experience whether or not you're drawing at the end is perfect it would be great if it was it's also great that it's not it's a learning process that you're going through and the fact that you've kind of manifested a drawing out of it

19:56 i think is the important part