Hi, I'm Simon Gaffney, teacher of the School of Visual Arts. My grand life joined classes week over an assignment called Recomposition, where we take an all-master drawing and painting and it could be contemporary in comic book as well. We're trying to evaluate how we can understand the compositions from their 3D aspects. So today we're going to take Caragagio's Judith and Holo Frenis and we're going to see if we can redo it so that we sense it in terms of the construction of through boxes, the geometric construction of cylinders and how Caragio wants you to move through the space not just along the surface. So let's go to that image now. So I'm going to cover this with the tracing paper and I'm going to begin to sense some of the larger structures in the composition. I already sense from this big sweep in, several ways I can enter this space. But that is a pretty large one. It brings me right up to the main character and I'm going to turn her backwards like this. It's trying to get a big sense, almost like thinking in terms of boxes. Gum being comes into mind and a lot of times you're doing this. Cylinders are great for next. I have a really strong lighting source thanks to Caragagio and it's theatrical lighting. And that helps me understand some of the simple box-like structures I can develop from the surfaces. So again, the idea here is that we are trying to see how to move in and out of the space. So by doing any kind of simplification of form, I'm going to be able to better understand those motions. Clothing will help, I can move across there. I'm also trying to get rid of some of the aspects which might tell me that this is a 17th century image. And part of that is the dress that Caragagio put in this image, which was contemporary to his time. He did not choose the biblical times that this was just Judith and Hall of Fairness. So I'm looking really at this, thinking of this as a structure, and as a structure of roundness going on his neck, which is about to come off. Let's see this and another movement in to the page. Sometimes what I will do for this assignment is start to identify things as having a kind of structural aspect to the space itself. It doesn't have to be an actual object. His arm is hiding underneath there. It's got a very clear plane of light on it. It's coming forward from here. Same thing. And what the idea is to get a sense of some of the rhythms that are also recurring or occurring throughout the aspect of the painting. I have to figure out this woman. Her arm comes into the space and that projects in. I'm going to give her a simplified look. We can turn the things she's holding into the cone. So a cone is a structure. A triangle is a shape. And you want to think in terms of cones, cubes, spheres, cylinders. Many of those pyramids will help as well. That's another geometric aspect. There was a big one under here, which is hard to see. And I'm going to try to reuse this as a kind of cone as well. Just going to see what happens there. Her hand and I think we're going to slip piece of paper under here and see where we are. You can understand this a little bit clearer. Now I have a more geometric aspect of the movements of this image. Here I'm going to attempt to do the same thing, but not from a tracing. I've scaled up the same image. This was just a tracing of the actual photo in the book. I've turned a diagonal line through it and I've created another two scale image. And I'm just going to transfer that to another single paper so I can draw directly on paper, not on tracing paper. So here I've started already some of the basic concepts of rhythm and movement through this. And what I want to do is really push the ideas of dimension that are happening through here. And then I'm going to do a bigger, clear counter movement to her sweep and it picks up through the cloth. But it's again an indication of me starting on the left and moving up into the main subject matter, which is all fairness losing his head. And I'm trying to not care about that. I just care about that. I want, I want, I want, I want, I want me to look about here. I have to keep in mind there's a center approximately here and nothing is happening there. Everything is going to revolve around that. So there's a box head. Here is an arm, a cylinder coming out at me. Very clear. Again, distinction through the lightning that I've got a form that has a top and a side plane. And not shapes. I want to think about these things as volumes as much as I can. This is how they were developed. It's very strong sense of the idea of volumes and using lines to create volumes and very theatrical ideas of moving around in the space. He would create these compositions more like an improvisation. So he has characters coming in and he's setting them up individually and creating these things without preliminary drawings. I want to complete this idea and like moving in. I don't have to stay to the idea of boxes. I can try to get an oval of some kind if I want to. But very important is to get the idea of the planes. I can even sometimes indicate that she's looking down at him. And I want it again since that she's looking across that space. He's trying to grasp, looking up. Now it gets a little strange and starts to happen. It starts to look like sponge bombs. You get these factors. Those are very similar to cones. This woman here is holding, say, just a simple conical element in her hand. Even if I were to stop here, I have a pretty clear sense that he's activating the space moving into it. That's really what I want to understand in the beginning of this assignment. Now I'm not just skimming across. I'm not just coming through thirds. I'm not just thinking about these things being part of perhaps the golden section. You can see that this could become a square. I want to sense this vortex, this sense of pulling into the space that he's really, really dynamically created. So in our next video, we're going to see how we can take this image and recompose it so that it becomes my content. I'm just going to play around with this off camera and try to take it to a level where I see more rhythms through it, more subtleties on it, based on what I'm looking at here, and not necessarily directly from the image. If you want to follow along with us, what we're going to do with our future assignments, you can look for us on Facebook and see if it gaffney's advanced drawing class at SVA or Tumblr at Stephen Gaffney Tumblr. And I hope you enjoyed this first one and hope there's more to come.