Spend a day copying one painting in a museum
“You will feel exposed setting up to draw in a room full of people who came to look, and your first version will be hopeless. By the fourth attempt you will know that painting better than the caption ever could tell you.”
The Recipe
- Choose the nearest museum or gallery that is free or cheap and lets people draw in the galleries.
- Walk through once and pick the one painting you cannot stop coming back to.
- Sit in front of it and spend the first hour only looking: how it is built, where the light comes from, what your eye does first.
- Draw the whole composition small and badly, to get the bones of it.
- Draw it again larger, fixing what the first version got wrong about the proportions.
- Break for lunch away from the room, then come back and see it fresh.
- Spend the afternoon on one part of it (a hand, a corner, the light on one object) until you can nearly reproduce it.
- Before you leave, read the caption you have been avoiding and see what it missed.
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