First week at LARA

I've just completed my first week on the full time course at LARA (London Atelier of Representational Art). It's been a pretty intense few days. We begin at 9.30am with figure drawing. We are doing a two week standing pose - which is progressing reasonably well. The tutors seem to be fairly happy with the direction my drawing is headed.

During the afternoon the newbies are doing Bargue drawings. The image to the left shows the plate that I am copying. The idea is to reproduce the plates so that the drawing is indistinguishable from the plate. I'd made various attempts at Bargue drawings before,  but I've never been completely sure what method you are supposed to adopt in reproducing them.

While my previous attempts had been fairly good - my understanding of the degree of accuracy needed was way below that which students are supposed to aim for. My drawings looked very similar from a distance but the idea is that they should be indistinguishable even when viewed very close at hand. It's a bit like gymnastics for your eye!

In addition to the morning figure work and the individual projects in the afternoon, we have a two hour anatomy lecture on Tuesday evenings. In addition to referring to Paul Richer's Artistic Anatomy - which I already had, we were recommend the books by Gottfried Bammes, which I have now got hold of (and added to the 'Resources' pages). There is also an open sketch group on Wednesday evenings.