Stan: We made it!
Part 3 of my chat and sketch tour with artist Stephen Bauman.
In this video, we talk about drawing, like a sculptor.
If you like how Stephen draws and you want him to be your teacher, check out his masterpiece
demo at proko.com/bauman.
It is a super in-depth series on drawing a realistic portrait from start to finish with graphite.
The man really knows how to drop knowledge on you.
So, go check it out at proko.com/bauman.
Here we go.
The sculptor on this table here, is this yours?
Stephen: This is by Eudald De Juana.
Stan: Is that one of those guys?
Stephen: That is Grzegorz Gwiazda.
Stan: Okay.
So, I follow both of those guys on Instagram a bit.
They are amazing.
So, do they inspire your drawings?
Stephen: Absolutely.
To be honest about that.
Stan: Their forms are kind of broken in an area then mold into each other.
Stephen: One of the things I really love about what they are doing, it actually comes out
of the technical side of it which is, when you are sculpting, at least I can speak through
the Florence Academy sculpting method, a lot of it is from the inside out.
It's not actually a lot of carving away.
Very little carving away.
In fact, if you are carving away from the surface, that means you haven't done other things correctly.
So, they are building from these high point lines and filling in volumes.
So, what they have is, at a certain point, they have these like really kind of deep volumes
at the surface, right?
And they are taking clay and kind of filling in those volumes to model the form at the surface, right?
Now, if have left behind like a very deep form, you would say that that deep form is under modeled.
I know what you are thinking, Stan.
Stan: What?
Stephen: Stop thinking it.
I am drawing two consensual -
Stan: Oh, no. I wasn't.
I was checking the model.
You are drawing so small, I don't think people will see this.
Stephen: All right. Wait a minute. Let's get to -
Stan: What were you thinking?
Stephen: So, you have like two forms, right?
Stan: Yeah.
Stephen: And what you going to be doing is, in order to create the surface form that you
want in that sculpture, you a going to be filling in with clay.
But if it is like if you are modeling the forms of the face or some of the subtle like
anatomy of the abdomen, there are not going to be some super deep forms.
Stan: Right.
Stephen: Right?
Stan: But why are they starting with a deep crevice like that?
Stephen: Think about like the front of the ribcage, right?
You have a plane that goes basically up to the costal cartilage which if you are blocking
it in, you could say it way fairly flat.
After that costal cartilage, then you begin the long turn of the ribs back to the angle
of the ribs at the back of the rib cage, right?
So, they know where the high point is, the next high point, and the next high point.
And they fill volumes in after that.
Now, sculpting like surface form is not dissimilar.
So, what is the high point of the pec major, right?
Follows along pec minor.
Stan: Got it. Okay.
Stephen: So, you go sternum, pec minor, out to where it inserts under the deltoid, right?
And those are your kind of high point lines when you start by sculpting.
So, what I wanted to do is kind of establish what over modeling versus under modeling is, right?
Stan: Okay.
Stephen: So, if you have under modeled a form, it means the creases in your form are too
deep to represent what you are trying to represent. Right?
Stan: Right.
Stephen: What is interesting in what I noticed Eudald doing is that he will actually, over model.
He will actually soften out.
Like even if this form is supposed to be like this he will actually fill that form in more
than what it is supposed to be.
And it has this effect of like, I don't know, it just really softens the impression that
we have of the figure.
Stan: Around the ear in this one, there is really deep creases.
Stephen: Under modeled structure.
Stan: Yes.
So, he has areas of under modeled and areas of over modeled that kind of balance out into
a really - it's kind of like a Fechin drawing where some areas are super sharp, super detailed,
and others are just noise.
Stephen: Yeah.
But like it goes back to, and this is the fascinating thing for me, it goes back to
a spectrum like this.
He is working with the language of modeling.
Stan: Yes.
But he is not copying nature, he is changing it.
Stephen: He is evoking things from it, yeah.
And I think when you start to work with the spectrums, right?
Line quality, right?
Form modeling quality.
Value quality.
All these things are on a spectrum and you can play with that.
You can key all of the lines in your drawing towards this.
The whole drawing is a soft cloud, right?
Stan: Yeah.
Stephen: It evokes something.
The harder that it is, it evokes something. Right?
But these are all like technical things that you can manipulate to create expression.
Most of the artist that, or at least they'd start out, they do these things incidentally.
We are just drawing to crisp lines and hard stuff so we just do it.
But if you think about that just as one flavor in a vast recipe, right?
One sound in an orchestra, you can really kind of craft expression based on these ideas
or manipulating these ideas.
Not something that really like I really get into when I notice other artist doing that
is probably a thing that I kind of most stimulated by when I see people like tweaking that, playing
with that, playing with the idea of resolution versus structure and chaos.
Stan: Yeah.
I like that.
Stephen: Which is what you are talking about with this dynamic.
Fechin is a great example.
Linear form, blasted out atmosphere.
One of those evoke when you combine them.
Stan: Yeah.
Stephen: All right.
So, this is a really like - talk about an idea I've had for years and that I have never
fully thought -
Stan: A butt? Just thinking about butts all for years.
Stephen: You thinking about those forms that were over and under modeled, aren't you Stan?
Stan: Yeah.
Stephen: I love the ideas.
If you have ever seen like antique sculpture, you go to the metropolitan, you go to the
Ancient Greek and Roman wing and they have these things that are like unearthed from
Pompeii, like the famous Belvedere Torso that Michelangelo was supposedly there when they
pulled it out from the ground in Pompeii.
Like he was there supposedly.
It was a huge kind of influence on him and it was kind of later a manner as to work, right?
But the idea of like a sculptural fragment is fascinating.
And actually, I worked on it as well with this.
So, like how to crop the figure in such a way as a sculpture would do, right?
That you kept a particular movement, a particular beautiful thing, and you extorted other things.
Right? You left them out.
You took them away so that we could focus on this one particular kind of movement.
It is actually very common place in modern figurative sculpture and very prominent antique
sculpture museums because literally this stuff got broken.
Stan: They have fell off.
Stephen: But now like it has become like a mode of communication for a number of sculptors
and I was always agh, this fruit is still on the vine for me.
Can you make drawing fragments...
Can you take a part of a figure out but present it as a whole?
Not as like - this a Vignette that I just draw the pectoral muscles and everything is
soft and hazy around it.
But to create an item like a subject that is contained and cropped with a form of theme in mind.
Stan: Well, when you do that, doesn't it just kind of look like you drew from a sculpture?
Stephen: Maybe.
But of course, this is drawn from life.
Stan: Yeah.
Stephen: But like I want to do that thing because of course, they are sculpting from life as well.
But they are saying like so - there is a very - it's a thing that you go through in your
second or third year, I think, at the academy in Florence where you will sculpture a life size torso.
Every student that does it has a subtly different cropping.
They take the arm off here, they find that the movement from the arm up on this side
down to the leg on this side is really dynamic and interesting, I want to emphasize that
by taking away this part, putting that part back in.
Stan: That is an interesting exercise.
Stephen: I think it is fascinating.
Stan: That is really cool.
Stephen: But for 2D artists, the manufacture of our work doesn't like make that happen on its own.
It is actually easier to kind of just draw the whole figure.
Stan: Yeah.
Stephen: For a sculpture it is actually easier to not sculpt the head.
Stan: Right.
Stephen: But I have always been thinking, how can you make that.
But also, here is what it is actually up against, the hard place that it is up against, it looks amputated.
It does not look that way in the sculpture.
You should accept it as this entity, this thing that exists and you don't - it looks
like it was just broken off.
Here it looks like I drew everything that as there but there was no arm there.
See what I mean? Or maybe you don't get that sense.
Stan: I don't get that sense. No.
I just associate it with a sculpture that was broken.
Stephen: I have primed you to think that.
I talked to you about fragments and then we looked at this.
Stan: Maybe.
Stephen: And now you are seeing it.
Stan: Get out of my head.
Stephen: So, long story short, that is what I was kind of trying to do with this one is
like, you know, what movements can I take in or what things can I leave out, and how
can I manufacture like a drawing space or a picture plane in which that is acceptable,
right? Stan: Yeah.
Stephen: Like this is actually a very different look than this.
You see what I mean?
Stan: Yeah, absolutely. Because you keep the rhythm going.
You have indicated that it is there, it's just lost.
Stephen: Yeah. And a little bit of value actually goes a long way in terms of doing that, right?
So, just like I talk about how lines are signaling things, values are signaling as well.
Here, this value says that there is a down plane that is hidden away from the light.
And then this is an up plane on top of the trapezius, right?
If I use that value in this shadow plane but it also echoes out the side of the figure
as well, maybe it puts the cropping a little bit under the carpet to where - we don't actually
think about the arm stopping there because the value is kind of hiding a little bit in
ambiguity like a kind of a smoky atmosphere; the ending of the arm.
Whereas, if I just draw an outline around it like this you kind of go, uh, looks like
it's stopping.
Stan: Oh, that is harder to do if the arm is actually in front of the body.
Like this is behind and you can lose it into the background.
What if it is the foreground?
Like this arm is kind of closer so, you cant get it -
Stephen: I should try this on that one, that's what I gonna do.
But again this is like a fruit that is still in the vine.
Like I haven't really dug too deep into this yet.
But it is evolving.
I will come to it eventually.
Stan: Yeah.
We will keep an eye on your Instagram.
You don't post too many of these things, you post more like finished stuff like this one.
Stephen: Yeah.
Like always my anatomical studies, I feel like they kind of look cool.
Stan: Yeah.
Stephen: But there are maybe just more incidental to me, you know?
Stan: You post these like in your stories or something?
Stephen: No. Maybe I should.
Stan: You should. People would love to see this stuff.
Stephen: Yeah.
Stan: I would.
Stephen: All right, Stan.
Stan: Got to click on your stories all the time.
Stephen: I am tagging you.
I also want to do eventually, I want to do some videos actually of dissections.
Stan: Like a human dissection?
Stephen: No. No. No. No.
Like my technique of- I mean, I know that other people do probably something similar
to this but I feel like there is something I developed while I was studying anatomy for myself.
Stan: That you'd do better.
Yeah.
Stephen: Which was like just trying to best my ability to draw the body as an écorché,
to draw it without skin and fat and to look more deeply into that.
And I have like really evolved the technique in doing it but I think it's actually, probably
really instructive and interesting but I have never committed to putting it on USB,
whatever the data vehicle is.
Stan: Well, thank you so much for showing us all of this.
I am pretty sure that it is going to be useful to people.
Stephen: Yeah.
We got a ton more too.
We still got to talk about the drawing that are almost finished.
Stan: Yeah. We are going to walk around your studio and talk about that.
And then, we are going to record your portrait.
So, yeah guys, if you want to see that portrait demo that he is going to record, proko.com/bauman.
And then, go check out more of his stuff on his Instagram website.
Support him at Patreon stephenbaumanartwork?
Stephen: stephenbaumanartwork, yeah
Stan: .com. And then also, that is his handle.
Stephen: Yes, on Instagram.
Stan: Cool.
Thank you so much, Stephen.
Stephen: Thank you, Stan.
Let's go have lunch.