Lormes: Goat-Girl Sitting Beside a Stream
Corot, Lormes: Goat-Girl Sitting Beside a Stream in a Forest, 1842. oil on fabric.
Pins mark where to look before you draw.
The Cleveland Museum of Art · Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund
Lormes: Goat-Girl Sitting Beside a Stream
A dark wood interior with one lit figure
1842, in the Morvan: a girl in a red cap sitting by a rocky stream under dense trees. Almost the whole canvas is dark; the stream, the rocks and the figure's cap are the lights. A woodland interior study: small lights in a big dark, like The Thinker, but with the lights lifted rather than scratched.
In pencilCharcoal or soft graphite: tone the whole sheet, lift the stream, rocks and figure.
- Difficulty
- Time
- about 1.5 h
- You draw with
- willow charcoal or 4B and 6B graphite
Why this one
- Woodland interior: the hardest light to design, done by subtraction.
- Shows the early Corot already composing by value.
From your kit
The whole kit →- 1Grafwood 4B, 6B 4B, 6B for the darks, on their sides for mass. Long points from the Blackwing on everything up to B.
- 2Willow charcoal, or until it arrives Pitt Matt 12B and 14B on their sides the matt grades are the closest graphite gets to willow. Slip sheet under the hand.
- 3Pitt Matt 14B, knife-sharpened stands in for the charcoal pencil: trunk, branch zig-zag, the one accent.
- 4Kneaded eraser (warm it) and the clean Mono Zero lift the lights out of the mass; the Mono Zero for sky holes and lit edges.
- 5Alpha sketchbook 9 x 6 draw at the book's size and keep the proportions; date the page.
In general, this study asks for
- Drawing pad or cheap newsprint
- Willow charcoal, medium
- Charcoal pencil
- Kneaded eraser
- Stump
- Workable fixative
Watch first
All videos →Laying a charcoal ground and lifting the lights out, the late-Corot method.
YouTube
The plan
3 stages · ~70 min- 1
Tone the sheet
10 minMid-dark charcoal over everything.
Checklist0 / 1 - 2
Lift the lights
50 minStream, rocks, the girl, in that order, with the kneaded eraser. Deepen the canopy around them. Nothing is drawn with a line.
Checklist0 / 2 - 3
Fix and box
10 minFix. Compare. Box.
Checklist0 / 1
What it should look like
- A dark wood with a bright stream and a small figure that emerged from the dark.
Where it goes wrong
- Lifting too much. Enthusiasm with the eraser. The lights are small. Keep the dark large.
Log this session
Start the clock when you pick up the pencil. Stop it when you put it down. Log it. Every session counts toward the box.
Status
How did it go?
Before this, ideally
