Bargue drawing

It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.

Quote by Camille Pissarro.

I had read that many realist art training courses, in ateliers around the world, make use of the drawing course established in the 19th century by the French artists Charles Bargue and Jean-Leon Gerome. 

Copying some of the plates from the Bargue course using charcoal or graphite is often the main focus of the first semester of the first year of an atelier education and I thought this approach might help me improve my own drawing skills, so I embarked on doing a copy of Plate 23, which is an arm and hand.

I found a YouTube channel, The Da Vinci Initiative which has a series of twenty-eight videos which are really good at taking you through this technical approach to drawing, according to the Bargue method and using the sight-size method.

The total time of these videos is just over 7 hours and as I was following along at the same time, with my own drawing, I probably spent about 20 hours following the 'course'. (It is estimated that atelier students can typically spend up to 60 hours on a more complex Bargue plate copy).

I think my end result was a decent enough copy of the plate and this is probably the main criticism of the course and of this technical approach - you become a human copying machine. And critics say that the work produced by most atelier students is the 'same' i.e. you can tell when the work has been produced by someone who has been through an atelier.

Whilst I do agree with the sentiment of that last statement, I think you can tell an 'atelier' produced piece of art because it has a good sense of proportion, the values are correct, it has a harmonious colour palette and has been well executed - not something you can say about every piece of art.

Its a stepping stone.

To be honest, I didn't like my first experience of the Bargue system but I stuck with it until I had finished this first one. In my high-school days I did Engineering Drawing as an O Level subject and this Bargue drawing approach felt very much like that (minus the T-square and set squares). Don't get me wrong, I loved Engineering Drawing (and I was awarded the school prize for the subject in my 4th year) but I felt that artistic drawing should be less technical and more emotional, expressive and fluid - however you want to describe it.

I can understand why they say 'Rembrandt was a great artist and draughtsman' - the draughtsman part certainly embodies the technical aspects of some forms of drawing.

Some of the things I did learn from doing this exercise were:

• The image I got of Bargue plate No 23 was probably a 5th or 6th generation copy and then I got it photocopied onto A3 paper by a local printer. As a result, there seemed to be lots of fine shading (high values) missing from my copy when I compared it to the one being used in the YouTube videos. This made it more difficult to judge where the high values should be.
• It's easy to be too heavy handed using soft (B) or medium (HB) charcoal. Hard charcoal (H) is slightly better when rendering higher values but controlling charcoal takes time and patience - most of my transitions are not smooth enough and looked a bit 'scratchy'.

I'm not sure if I'll do any more Bargue plates but I do realise that its not the be-all and end-all of drawing - it's a stepping stone. On the surface it is about copying the lithographic plates but what it teaches you is sight-sizing, proportions, looking for angles and extending their lines to help your construction, simplifying big shapes and then refining them smaller, simplifying curves with straight lines and of course controlling how values shift from dark to light.

These are all transferable skills when you consider the atelier progression to drawing casts and then to drawing from real life - after all, aren't we usually 'copying' something.