Nate Snitzer Art ~ Classical Oil Paintings & Drawings

Sorry for the low quality on the photographs. The camera I used four years ago was not of the highest quality, and couple that with my inability at that time to even take a picture of a statue without making it look like a horror movie action shot, you can understand how the quality of these photos came about. Hopefully they will convey enough information to help answer any questions with the master copy.

Basic Supplies and Setup:

• A Drawing Board (Masonite Panel, Drawing Board, etc.)
• 2H, H, HB, & B Wooden Pencils or Pencil Lead Packs
• Lead Holder (if using Pencil Lead Packs)
• Lead Pointer or Sand Paper Block
• Artists Tape
• Kneaded Eraser
• Mars Plastic Eraser
• High Quality, Heavy Weight Drawing Paper (Stonehenge or Vellum)
• Straight Razor Blade
• Dark Colored String
• Clear Plastic Flexible Ruler
• Copy of a Master Drawing from your Favorite Artist (I recommend Charles Bargue’s Drawing Plates from the book titled “Charles Bargue et Jean-Leon Gerome. Cours de dessin”)

Important Note: The name of the game with the master copy is patience and a light hand. Draw LIGHTLY with soft light marks and lines and gradually build to darker lines and tones. Save the heavy handed work for when you want rip your drawing off of the board later on, trust me, everyone gets there at some point.

SETUP:

Important Note: The setup is the most critical stage of your master copy. A sloppy setup can lead to many issues later on with your master copy, so please be careful and precise in your setup. Use the old carpenters rule, “measure twice, cut once”, or in our case, “measure twice, draw once, erase once, draw again, tear in half”, or some variation of it.

Master Copy Setup

1. Setup your drawing board, placing your paper and the drawing you intend to copy side by side, using the straight edges of the drawing board to ensure a good alignment.

2. Secure your paper and the master copy, evenly and smoothly with artists tape. I also recommend placing a sheet or two of paper behind your drawing paper as well to provide some nice padding and bounce for the pencil when drawing. A hard board behind the paper can cause shading and pencil mark issues as it pronounces the paper texture too much.

3. Find a good straight vertical arrangement of points on your master copy subject where you intend to drop your plumb line, (the dark string). Try to find a straight vertical line that touches many easy, distinctly clear points on the subject matter. Once you find a good location for it to go through, secure the string over the drawing, both top and bottom.

4. Using your ruler, find a good spot on your paper and draw a straight line down, ensuring that it’s equidistant from the sides of the paper on both the top and bottom.

5. Before starting the drawing, double check your plumb lines on the master copy and your paper and make sure they are ABSOLUTELY straight up and down. Any crookedness in the plumb lines will lead to a skewed and ruined drawing later on. It is important you get these lines perfectly straight up and down. Did I mention make sure they are straight? Good.

BLOCKING IN:

Important Note: When blocking in the drawing, it is important you work in clean, light, straight lines. Save the curves for when it comes time at the end to refine your block in. ALWAYS KEEP A SHARP POINT ON THE PENCIL! Don’t let it go blunt.

Important Note: Keep the ruler handy, but use your eye and a length of string in your hand to measure and place your dots. Never use the ruler to do the outright measuring work for you, it is only there to triple check what your eye and string have already done. You will learn a great many things just from this alone, so triple check all of your measurements, it’ll literally open your eyes.

Measuring the Points using the Plumb Line

1. Establish the top and bottom of your subject matter on your paper by placing either a dot or a line through your plumb line on your paper.

2. Start your block in with the envelope by placing the clearest angle changes and simplifying large areas of complicated line and form changes into one simple line. The simplest way to do this is by finding the clear, distinct angle junctions, measuring them out, and placing just a simple dot. When you have two dots established on the same line plane, connect them. The name of the game at this point is just establishing the mass of the drawing and keeping it simple, simple, SIMPLE. Don’t over complicate this stage of the drawing.

Early Block In

3. After you have a full envelope established and you are comfortable and confident with the measurements, move within the long expanses of lines and start breaking them down into their smaller angle changes and forms. Keep those lines straight at this stage though, you are simply just breaking the envelope into smaller chunks, much like a marble sculptor. Save the rounding of the forms for later on.

Finished Block In

4. After you have confidently broken down the envelope into it’s smaller forms, start refining the form. At this stage, you want the block in to literally resemble the silhouette of the master copy you are working from. Establish all the minutiae, the convex and concave curves, round out the forms, work sensitively and lightly. Your pencil marks should still be soft and light and get your eraser handy and keep modifying the form. Much of this work will be done by eye, so be very sensitive to complicated areas of line change. Lay your ruler along an entire line segment to see the variation in angle and lines that are happening.

Refining the Block In

MOVING INSIDE:

Blocking in the Shadows

1. So you think you are ready to move into the inside, huh? This step is essentially like the block in stage, only you will be doing the blocking in with the distinct shadow shapes. Squint at your drawing by letting your eyelids rest and drawing your upper eyelid down slightly. The drawing should go blurry and many of the areas of value should either merge into one distinct shape or disappear entirely. Those large areas of dark shadow that merge are going to be your cast shadows. Establish the envelope for all of these cast shadow shapes.

2. It is important to ignore the areas of midtone value, the value between light and shadow. These values will be rendered in at the last stage and won’t need to be blocked in like the shadows.

3. After envelopes of the shadows have been established, then refine the shadow shapes just as you had done the outside block in. Keep these shadow lines very light, they will all be disappearing when it comes time to render the shadows in, and the last thing you want is a dark line outlining all of your shadows.

4. When you have refined all the shadow shapes, go ahead and do a very light tone inside of your shadows just to help establish that those shapes are indeed shadows. This will help you differentiate the areas on the inside of the drawing when it comes time to render.

RENDERING:

Rendering the Master Copy

Important Note: Before moving onto the final rendering, take care to fix any drawing errors or measurement errors that may have happened to pop up while working on the shadow shapes, and trust me when I say this, they will, in droves. It’s kind of like those zombie movies where they keep coming out of nowhere and the good guys go crazy trying to kill them all as one after another just walks right into their hatchets. Yeah, your drawing is going to be kind of like that for a little bit, just don’t use a hatchet to fix the errors on your drawing, even if you really feel like it.

Important Note: SQUINT, SQUINT, SQUINT! Like I had explained earlier, squinting is the simple motion of resting your eyes and letting your eyelids slightly come together. Your drawing should blur, your edges should soften, and your values should group together and stand apart. Use the squint to judge relationships in the drawing. What is the hardest edge on the master copy, what is the softest edge, what is the lightest light, the darkest dark? All of these things will become clear when you squint at your subject. Remember to open your eyes when drawing though, you don’t want to squint at your paper as well.

When you feel that the shadow shapes and outline of the drawing are satisfactorily accurate, start building up the rendering on your drawing. What this means is all those shadows, need to get darker now, as well as all of those midtones you left alone earlier, hopefully, now need to be rendered in. You will draw in these values with a very light hand and a slow build up. One of the major issues that can come about from working too fast and hard with the pencil at this stage is you can deaden the tooth on the paper, and what happens with this is the lead will no longer go down onto the paper and it will be impossible to erase those spots that go dead, so be careful, work slow and build it up.

Use that kneaded eraser like a value scalpel, roll it between your thumb and forefinger and get a nice sharp point on it. Use it to carefully pick out value, pick out odd dark spots, etc. Think of your kneaded eraser at this stage as your second pencil. Your pencil will slowly and carefully darken the drawing and establish the form, and your kneaded eraser will slowly and carefully lighten areas or move values and forms around.

Finished Master Copy

Keep in mind, it is very important in the rendering stage that you take your time. This is the bread and butter of what we do as artists and you will learn a tremendous amount about values, edges, and judging them from this stage. The goal, when completed, is that you will have a carbon copy of one drawing next to the other.