I'm teaching a course for Osher at CMU called Drawing in the Museum. We meet in the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History each week and tour one of the exhibit halls, making sketches of the artworks and items on display.
We began in the Museum of Natural History's Halls of North American Wildlife, African Wildlife and Botany.
The following week, we moved on to the Hall of Architecture, where we found statuary, columns and facades to illustrate in our sketchbooks.
The museums allow visitors to draw, but only with graphite pencils and sketchbooks small enough to fit on your lap.
Those requirements make copying oil paintings particularly challenging.
We invite our intuition to lead us in figuring out how to create the textures and values we see in the paintings with our pencils.
My sketch of the painting "Head of a Woman" by Eugene Carriere.
You can see the original here:
Drawing in the museum is an age-old technique for learning from the masters. When you draw something, you see it more deeply than when you simply glance by it.
When was the last time you went to a museum? Why not take a pencil and a sketch book along with you and sketch your favorite artwork?
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