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Artists in their studio

Daylight for your atelier – LEDs with high CRI >90 for best lighting

The ideal light source in a traditional atelier is daylight coming from a high north facing window. But this comes with several downsides: not everyone has a north facing window high enough and working at daylight limits you to just a few hours at the easel. If you have a full-day job and can only get to the easel in winter when it is already dark, you are dependent on an artificial light source. Why daylight coming from high above? The human brain is still … Read more

Cast Drawing of David's eye

Plaster Casts for Cast Drawing available again

When I started my online activities in the field of classical art, I offered my own Plaster Casts for Cast Drawing at a reasonable price at www.cast-drawing.com, as the market only offered expensive goods from real sculptors. People were happy to accept my Plaster Casts, because it was exactly what they needed to learn drawing from plaster casts. Nothing special and in any case not expensive. After all, it was meant to serve as a reference once or maybe twice and not as a decorative … Read more

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All about the Academic Cast Drawing – The best resources

Cast Drawing is an excellent exercise for painting realistically. It teaches you to see form in three dimensions and transfer it to a two dimensional surface – the drawing paper. Cast Drawing is the following step in learning classical art after having practised the Bargue Drawings. Below is a collection of the most valuable resources in the internet on Cast Drawing. So make sure to read the whole article plus all linked sources. The materials you’ll need Cast Drawings are usually done in charcoal for … Read more

Rembrandt with IKEA

What is your IKEA Atelier hack?

When it comes to equipping your own home atelier, you might ask yourself what else you need besides paints, brushes and the like. The studio must also be equipped with certain furniture. You propably need a small table that can be used to place the glass palette on it. And maybe you need a few drawers to store the tube paints. The IKEA atelier hack I have shown you my “IKEA picture frame hack” before. Instead of using a wooden hand held palette I switched to a … Read more

Free Planes of the head

Get a free Planes of the Head sculpture

There are several ‘Planes of the Head’ on the the market but this one is absolutely free! Ok, at least it will cost you only four sheets of paper, some glue, printer ink and 2-3 hours working time. Compared to the 115$ that an original Asaro head costs this is practically nothing! What is a ‘Planes of the Head’ actually good for? Such a head sculpture shows you the simplified planes of the head. Please read the following pages for further information on how useful … Read more

Print Munsell color with your printer - PDF

Munsell Color Charts PDF to print at Home

“Thank you for making this product available,it’s very useful!” Florent Farges – www.florentfarges.com Color references are often very pricey. In my blog post “Save hundreds on studio equipment!” I showed you how I made my own color charts. In the end this can literally save you hundreds of (insert your currency here). And in “Mixing Neutrals” I showed how I made a neutral value scale based on my Munsell color chips from the Munsell Student book. In the blog post “Munsell 101 for the Artist” I explain … Read more

IKEA HISTORISK Sketch book

The IKEA HISTORISK sketchbook and their takeaway pencil

IKEA not only has furniture I often use the HISTORISK Sketch book from IKEA for it has a slightly tinted and smooth paper, which I like very much. IKEA has them in two sizes (20 x 15 cm and 14 x 10 cm). They come in different cover colors and have nice ink illustrations on the front and back and so do the other HISTORISK products. If you are interested in it, check if your IKEA has it. I don’t know which country has it in the program … Read more

Anatomy of a bodybuilder

Anatomy of a Bodybuilder – A perfect learning tool for artists

Weight training and Bodybuilding play an important role for me as long as I can remember. I early learned about muscular anatomy through the magazines and my own experience. Bodybuilders and artists have a lot in common: both strive for an aesthetic beauty through painstaking work. As I wrote in my post about learning anatomy and anatomy apps looking for Bodybuilding sources can be beneficial for your art education. “A Google search on Bodybuilder or Bodybuilder Anatomy will bring you many, many results from which you can learn from. … Read more

How to sculpt your own Écorché anatomy figure

Ecor… what? Écorché! The classical ateliers also offer – besides drawing and painting classes – sculpting classes where you are taught anatomy either with an écorché figure or a nude figure (see here their Facebook photos with lots of sculpures!). Écorché simply means flaying/skinning. An écorché figure is a sculpture where the bones and muscles are visible. Here I’ve already talked about some anatomy learning apps for your smart device. Drawings and paintings are two dimensional representations of a three dimensional reference. Beeing able to make this transfer … Read more

Save hundreds on studio equipment! Color charts on a budget

Save 781.50€ on studio equipment!…..What? Recently I talked about the Munsell color system which in brief is a system based on the three qualities of color – hue, value and chroma which helps you in judging color. As an artist you will need to know what colors to mix for your subject and which paints to choose to mix these specific colors. And here comes a color catalogue in handy. While there are some painters who have the Munsell Book of Color* the old masters only … Read more

Video: Cast drawing ‘Ear’

I’ve made a Cast Drawing video. It’s a drawing of the EAR plaster cast that I am offering in my shop and which is currently the best selling product of them (besides the skull). You can also see this ear in a drawing by Heather – I wrote about it here. For this drawing I used a regular fine 185g/m² drawing paper from a drawing pad and 3 pencils H, HB & 2B and it took me about 8 hours. The editing of this Cast … Read more

Mannequins as nude models

Learning human anatomy is an important part of the study in classical art. Drawing a nude model not only teaches you skills in patient rendering but also anatomy. In the Academy you work on one single nude drawing for up to 6 weeks with a total of  ~50-60 hours ending up super realistic. See here a 6 week charcoal drawing of a male nude by Dorian Iten done at the Angel Academy of Art. If you scroll down the page he is posting a step-by-step (click here … Read more

I am not alone

In July I posted a list of blogs of professional artists and art schools which I find useful and informative for those learning classical art at home. But there are also blogs in the internet by other self teaching people just like me. For example this is Heather’s blog and I must say she is doing verrrry well. Though she started to blog in August 2012 she took the structured atelier way in October 2012 with a Bargue drawing. When I found her blog I … Read more

Drawing of a male nude figure

Practising nude drawing – The ultimate guide

Learning human anatomy is an important part of the study in classical art. Drawing a nude model not only teaches you skills in patient rendering but also anatomy. In the Academy you work on one single drawing for up to 6 weeks with a total of ~50-60 hours ending up super realistic (see some examples here, here and here). If a nude model gets paid $15/hour, that makes $750-950 for a complete drawing. Too much to hire a model on your own so attending a nude drawing class is … Read more

Squint your eyes!

Squinting helps us to seperate the lights from the darks and allows us to see larger relationships. You’ll need that for judging composition, values and shapes. If you want to judge the value of a given color you’ll sometimes have a hard time doing so because color distracts us from the value. But when you squint your eyes, the color will fade just enough to be able to judge the value. Values at both ends of the value scale – white and black – and … Read more

Got no drawing casts? (part 2) Make your own!

As you know cast drawing is a very good way to learn to draw a three dimensional object. It’s the second step in learning classical painting techniques as it is taught in many ateliers. The ateliers have many plaster casts from which the students can choose. But what about someone learning at home? There are several sculptor shops in the internet that sell plaster casts but for an unreasonable price (except my drawing casts shop for those in Europe). Especially when you just need a … Read more

Do not save on the wrong things

I recently received an oil paint set with 12 different colors as a gift. This set of tubes was sold at a very low price for around 3€ so I was curious about the paint’s quality and as I expected, the quality is very low. Although this blog is also about saving money with your classical art studies I don’t recommend these types of paint. Because if you save on the wrong things you’ll propably pay twice. Maybe these paints are sufficient for making color exercises … Read more

Eyeballing

Eyeballing is a very usefull and necessary technique to be able to spot differences between the reference and your artwork. As a child I loved to make these ‘spot the differences’ games that were printed in magazines. The more difficult the better. And so it is with your art training at home. I guess I won’t have to explain in detail how this works. Just stand back enough to see the reference and your drawing at one glance and then compare – eyes to the … Read more

Anatomy tools

In order to paint a figure correctly you need to know about anatomy – where the muscles are originated, how they work and which bones they move. To just look at what you see is not enough – you’ll need a thorough understanding of anatomy. It is not necessary to be able to name every of the >650 muscles of the human body like a physician but knowing how the body is composed helps a lot in your ability to draw – even with other … Read more