I have spent another 25 hours on my pencil portrait, and still haven't rendered a single part of it to a finalized state. I'm happy with where it is going, but progress is slow. A1 really is big, and even 45 hours of work gets stretched thin!

Below is the detail of the apron. Whilst it looks patchy here, it comes together nicely when viewed at a distance. I intend to shade everything as carefully and as accurately as I did in my Bargue plates, which will ensure the finished picture looks good even when viewed up close.

I'm taking a break from my Bargue plates, and drawing something new. I've spent around twenty hours on a portrait of my sister, working from a photograph I took in December 2011.

For the first time I'm drawing upright on an easel (rather than horizontally on a table), and on a big scale. I'm working at A1 -- whereas my Bargue plates were smaller than A4 -- and I'm using correspondingly heavier paper. At 300gsm it is twice as weighty as my Bargue sketchbook pages, and it is able to take much more aggressive erasing and re-working. This gives me confidence to lay down lines that I know can be altered later, and the large size allows me to be much more expressive when sketching out the initial form.

As the paper is so large I have drawn guidelines to separate it in to thirds to make sizing easier. I am currently refusing to use a ruler or tape-measure to precisely map the enlargement from source image to final drawing, as this feels like cheating. I instead measure relative lengths against a small paintbrush. 

Here is the sketching and rendering so far. I need to fine-tune the facial features, which are distorted at the moment, but I'm happy with how the shading on the fabric is going so far; see the image below for a close-up.

Here is the original photograph from which I am working. I desaturated it and printed it at A3, and have it taped next to the drawing to use as a sizing reference. Unfortunately the printed version has lost a lot of the tonal depth, so I use the digital version on my laptop as the source for values and detailed areas.

I've been working on this Bargue plate (number 38 in the sequence) for several weeks now, and I've found it increasingly tedious. When I came to draw in the fiddly bits of hair (which I foolishly left until after I had started shading the face), I found that they didn't slot in to their proper places easily. I found myself having to distort and elongate strands of hair to accommodate increasingly apparent errors of alignment on a more fundamental level. I have conceded defeat and abandoned this plate as "unfinished".

Whilst I like the smooth gradients on the face, I find it difficult to look beyond the horizontal distortion that caused me so much aggravation when I came to put in the details.

The composite image shows my drawing against the silhouette of the original plate, illustrating very clearly how my attempt has gone wrong. The original is significantly thinner.

My latest Bargue plate is "The Cardinal de Birague by Germain Pilon", and took me around twenty hours to complete. In the sequence the plates are presented in the Cours de Dessin, this is the first plate to offer the full gradation of tone from pitch black through to the most delicate grey.

This is where I have spent most of my time drawing over the past fifty or so days. It's far from optimal for the Bargue studies, as it does not allow me to use the sight-sizing approach that the course recommends. Instead, I work in a sketcbook on a horizontal surface, taking references from the plates held vertically in the easel. I work at a different size from the plates, so leave a lot of room for errors to creep in.

 

I have uploaded high-resolution scans of all of my Bargue studies so far, which can be seen in the gallery. The most challenging was Plate I, 30 - Legs of the dying slave, which I made many attempts at, and still haven't got completely right. Here's the best one:Plate I, 030 - Legs of the dying slave - Attempt 4

Almost a full month in to my 1000 hour challenge, and I have completed 100 hours of Bargue drawings. I have most enjoyed Plate I, 24 - Arm of Moses by Michelangelo, which is the first drawing in the course not to have a helpful preliminary sketch to work from. I made two attempts at this plate, the second of which is below.

The plates which look simple, particularly the legs, are boring to do, and the easiest to get wrong. There aren't very many internal reference points in these, and it's easy to get angles slightly off and ruin the whole thing. I tend to lose interest in this kind, and don't have the discipline to go back and re-do them -- hardly the level of rigour the course intends!