The purpose of this illustrated lecture is to provide art students with an overview of the drawing devices, conventions, and the systems employed by master artists to construct drawings of the human figure. To quote Edgar Degas: “A picture is something which requires as much knavery, trickery and deceit as the perpetration of a crime, (because)an artist does not draw what he sees, but what he must make others see.”
Through the discussion, and analysis, of master drawings, and the work of students, I introduce and explain why it is that master a draughtsman never copy what he sees.
The current fascination with the faithful reproduction of appearances is an undertaking that would discourage a master draughtsman from picking up a pencil: no one ever drew what they saw. Artists do not copy what they see.
This video set is also available for purchase on barnstonestudios.com.
Your Instructor
My videos are selling all over the world. This series is one of the best and most complete drawing and design courses available anywhere..
Therefore, this set of video lectures, classes and assignments represent a self-standing comprehensive university level art education.
Unlike so many "teach yourself" videos, I do not trivialize my material to avoid threatening the timid. Were the craft of drawing, painting, sculpture and design a simple-minded form of therapy, these subjects would not have attracted the life’s work of so many great minds. Nor, would the world’s museums be so richly filled with masterworks.