Realism, inspired drawing, Sketchbook

Purpose: To gain a basic understanding about the Realism Art Movement and to identify Artists who work(ed) in this style.

The Realist movement was composed of people who just wanted to paint things as they saw them. This included common and sometimes ugly subjects that weren’t attractive to the upper class art style of stiff and conventional paintings. The subjects that realists dealt with sometimes depicted social, political, and economic issues of their time. The movement never became really solid and unified, but it definitely had an impact on future movements. The Realist movement took place from about 1830-1880

The Desperate Man

Gustave Courbet

1845

Part 2

Edna Schonblum

Edna Schonblum’s work is similar to Gustave Courbet’s in the sense that it depicts something simple and real. Neither of the paintings seem to contain any aspects of Romanticism. Both paintings also use shadows well to show the angle of light and size and shape of the objects. In terms of differences, Edna Schonblum uses brighter colors that catch your attention. Even though she didn’t use a wide variety of colors, her painting looks more colorful than Gustave Courbet’s. Gustave uses more neutral colors that are more common in real things. Schonblum also uses line and angles well, unlike in Courbet’s painting. I prefer Schonblum’s painting because of its use of color and lines. Looking through more of Schonblum’s work, her paintings seem overall more interesting to me than Gustave Courbet’s.

By doing this assignment I learned to pay more attention to detail due to the fact that the original was very detailed and had many different values. I had to make sure that my values didn't blend together and that they were very defined. I also learned to not outline shapes in the drawing. At first, I outlined everything and started to put values in inside the lines, but I realized that what I needed to do was show shapes in the drawing by using contrasting values and colors.