BLOGART Lesson 1.

To start this lesson I'm going to enhance the photo so as to highlight it's tones.

This enables you to better see the lights and darks and shades in between.

The next step is a basic one. Used by many Old Masters was the technique of "gridding" the work you wish to copy and transferring the work by grid to your canvass or paper. The grid has to be proportionally correct. If you wish to enlarge the photo to double size then your canvass grid will be double that of the photo.

Old masters used grids to expand their preliminary sketches, known as "cartoons", into finished works. Old masters often had apprentices working in their studios who worked from the gridded cartoons onto finished canvasses. Artists like Raphael, Da Vinci and Titian had teams of young artists working for them replicating the masters sketches.

You will notice that due to the photo's lack of definition I have had to draw in the left hand shape of the figure as well as the legs and crotch.

To transfer the photo's information to your canvas look carefully at each square and reproduce the information within. The more accuracy you can achieve, the better your completed work will be.

Start with the external shape.

Examine carefully where the lines of the figure intersect the grids. Make a judgment based position of the intersection, i.e half way or a third the way down a line, etc. Sometimes the space left over or the space within, I call it the "negative space," is an important clue as to where the lines go.

If you are interested in my classes I am available to give personal instruction in my Prahran studio.

You can contact me on 0417 566 276.