Bargue Muscles

Copying the Charles Bargue Drawing Course lithograph plates offers students many drawing lessons. At the Academy of Realist Art our students try to make as close to an exact copy as possible. This sharpens their ability to discern shapes, teaches many lessons about how a sculptor architecturalizes form and improves their perception of value shifts. Sometimes the Bargue plates are so subtle in their values that students have difficulty seeing some of the value shifts. In order to better "read" the values instructors frequently talk with students about the form that the values are describing. A great way to better understand the form is to take an anatomy book and try to assign muscles where you think they would be on the sculpture and then look at the Bargue lithograph to connect the values to this muscular structure. Here is an example of Stephen Kivimaki's Antique Torso copy and his muscular study. This had the added value of enhancing Stephen's knowledge of the anatomy - information that will come in handy during figure drawing class.

Academy of Realist Art, Boston student and instructor Emanuela De Musis was awarded a scholarship by the Portrait Society of America. Her scholarship covers tuition and housing expenses for her attendance at The Art of the Portrait 2011 Annual Conference in Atlanta Georgia. Emanuela is looking forward to participating in the classes, workshops and technical discussions featured at this years conference.

Emmy's scholarship application submission included the stunning dry brush painting she did of fellow student Sean at the beginning of fall semester. Congratulations Emmy!

Several paintings and drawings by Cindy MacMillan and Emanuela De Musis are currently on exhibit as part of "The Academy Way" exhibit at the Hamilton Conservatory for the Arts Gallery in Hamilton, Ontario. The work will be on display through March 10th.

Figure drawing students spent a few days at the beginning of spring quarter drawing one another. Coupled with a series of lectures the emphasis of these small studies was to use flat planar values on the face to describe the volume of the head. You can see Stephens cartoon and 3" planar study of Lindsay. He is keeping the lightest and brightest values for areas of the forehead and upper cheek. The rest of the values progressively darken as they explain the planes that are farther away from the light. Lindsay took her 3" study of Stephen a step further by refining the conceptualized planar values. Both students will be working on an extended finished drawing of one another. We will post them when they are complete.