I was wondering if the Charles Barque drawing course is a good thing to attempt if you wanna get better at understanding drawing.
>>2333659
What's wrong with studying Bargue Plates?
Yes, it teaches you to simplify.
>>2333658
It does if you hold yourself to a standard of perfection. In school we worked on these things for weeks at a time making perfect shadow lines and contours. If you actually put the time in they help.
i felt like doing a bunch of them helped me.
unfortunately they are very stylized. lot of large areas of white and black with lines that don't follow forms.
if only gustave dore or vincent van gogh had a drawing course -_-
>>2333658
It really depends on your goals and how you copy them. I'm not much a fan of modern methods of copying it and the use of sight-size. It's a bastardization of the actual 19thC methods. That said, many people today swear by that and have successful careers built on it. You'll need to decide yourself what your goals are and if Bargue is appropriate (for example, it is absolutely useless for, say, an animator).
>>2334020
They're stylized on purpose. The simplification of values and the handling of things in general was to make it easier for beginners to understand the concepts and learn. It was also designed to help build the tastes of the students in a specific direction. In fact, the entire course was designed specifically to replace an existing course that they felt was overly complicating things for beginners and producing mediocre students. Compare the old Julien plate of Homer:
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-e7BdmV7hXuc/VJvTe39UsrI/AAAAAAAANd8/XnElwKm0Y10/s723/Bargue%2520-%25200013.png
With that of the Bargue course: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-EDLtClTkjys/VJvTvYbSbbI/AAAAAAAANd8/yIZcD2X3lT4/s720/Bargue%2520-%25200014a.png
Both of those are poor reproductions (hard to find good ones online), but even so you can see the Julien course had a lot of complex hatching and mottled/patchy values with heavy reflected lights. The Bargue plate intentionally flattens the shadows and groups values together more for a clearer read and easier comprehension.
Also Van Gogh himself copies Bargue plates. Oh, and the Dore images you admire are probably not actually by him, but are by engravers who interpreted his loose drawings.
