Free Master Study Mode

A master study in four stages

A copy goes wrong when everything is attempted at once. The plan here takes one question at a time. The notan thumbnail asks only where the light shapes end and the dark shapes begin. The block-in puts the big shapes down at full size. The values stage sets the darkest dark and the lightest light, then the tones between. Colour comes last, on top of a drawing and a value plan.

Every time is yours to change, a stage set to 0 is left out, and a rest between stages is one switch. The stage names and their order are this tool's own plan, a common way of working and not a rule.

The paintings, and where they come from

The twenty-five paintings are from the Cleveland Museum of Art's Open Access collection: seven portraits, seven figure paintings, seven landscapes and four still lifes. Each was checked against the museum's own service on the day the set was built, and is here only because that service marked it CC0, which lets anyone use the image without fees or restriction according to the museum's Open Access page.

The sixth collection is the study set of the classical figure reference sessions. For any other work, save the image from a museum's open-access page and choose Open your own picture.

Lenses that follow the stage

Notan leaves two tones, which is what a thumbnail copies. Squint blurs the picture until the detail goes and the big shapes stay, for the block-in. Five values pushes every tone to the nearest of five steps. You can change a stage's lens or flip the picture left for right.

Measuring on the picture

Unit and measure puts two lines on the picture: lay the broken one along something you trust and the solid one along anything else. The page reads the white line in units of the yellow, with its lean in degrees and as a clock position. To measure a photo of your own drawing the same way, use the plumb line and angle tool.

The compare step: drift and value

The photo of your copy is lined up with the picture on your device, and two things are measured. Drift is how far the shapes of your copy sit from the same shapes in the picture, as a share of the longer side. Value is how much lighter or darker your copy is, on a scale of 1 to 10. A third picture shows it: blue where your copy is darker, orange where it is lighter.

Glare or a shadow across the paper shows up as a value difference, so photograph the copy in even light. One report is that of the drawing accuracy checker. The other is that of the value checker.

What it leaves out

It does not search museums from this page. It gives no written analysis of a painting: the stage tasks are the same for every work. The palette is colours for a screen, not a list of paints. It does not judge edges, brushwork or likeness.