Neither this site nor the Memory Drawing sites are about me because both Sight-Size and Memory Drawing are subjects which cannot be tied to a single individual. Nevertheless, I understand that readers have an interest in who the person is behind the articles. With that in mind I offer a brief autobiography below.

My first exposure to Sight-Size came in 1980, when I was 16 years old. I had taken all of the available art classes at my high school and the teacher recommended me for a special, off-campus program. I was allowed to take any course at the local art center, paid for by the school and during school hours.

The course I chose was Artistic Anatomy, run by Annette LeSueur who was a student of Richard Lack. In reality, the course was a three level introduction to Sight-Size, figure drawing, and anatomy.

Each session began with basic instruction in Sight-Size figure drawing while in front of the live model. This was followed by an hour and a half working on a pencil drawing, still in front of the model.

After the figure session, Annette gave a lecture on anatomy. For homework, we were to begin a skeletal anatomy tracing over our figure drawing. As I recall, we spent four weeks on that drawing, and in the end we had also completed a muscle overlay in addition to the skeletal. Numerous other Sight-Size figures followed, along with their attendant anatomical overlays.

I continued on with Annette privately in her home after the Artistic Anatomy class ended.

Annette was my introduction, not only to Sight-Size, but also to Richard Lack. He agreed to take me on as a private student. I spent two to three afternoons a week at his atelier, under his tutelage, learning how to see via Sight-Size cast drawing. That was in 1981 and 1982.

The first concept Mr. Lack taught me was that starts were important. He therefore had me begin numerous cast drawings and did not allow me to bring the majority of them to a tighter finish. The drawings below represent some of those starts. I do not recall working more than a couple sessions on each of those drawings.

Mr. Lack has now passed, but he has a multitude of former students who owe him a great debt. You can read more about him in this article over here.

After high school (and a year at commercial art school) I sought out Annette and learned that she had opened her own atelier. I spent four years there, being taught by her and the numerous, former Lack students who passed through her school as teachers. David Erickson and Jeffrey Larson were two of them.

Most of our projects were done in Sight-Size, including casts, pencil and charcoal figure drawing, painted figures, still life, portraits, and interiors. We spent a lot of time on anatomy, going so far as to participate in a dissection of a cadaver at a local chiropractic college. We also did a fair amount of portrait and figure drawing via Comparative Measuring. Night classes at Atelier Lack with Mr. Lack and Stephen Gjertson filled in whatever gaps I might have had at the time.

After Annette’s I went on my own grand tour of Europe. That trip ultimately led me to Florence, Italy and Studio Cecil-Graves.  

Charles H. Cecil is a former student of both R.H. Ives Gammell and Richard Lack. Daniel Graves is a former student of Nerina Simi and Richard Lack. These two Americans teamed up in the early nineteen-eighties to found Studio Cecil-Graves. The atelier was based off of principles they learned from their teachers. One of those was Sight-Size. Another was using traditional materials, though that’s a story for a different version of my autobiography.

I studied with Charles and Dan during 1989 and 1990. Shortly after I left Florence, they split. Charles went on to found Charles H. Cecil Studios. Dan created the Florence Academy of Art. Both institutions are still going strong and both still base their instruction on Sight-Size.

But for three years during the 1990’s and early 2000’s I was Assistant Director of the Minnesota River School of Fine Art (aka MRSFA). In-between I moved to Jerusalem to paint landscapes. During that period I led a tour of Florence and Rome for some of my MRSFA students and while on the Florence part of the tour I reconnected with my former teacher, Charles H. Cecil. He offered me the Assistant Director position at his atelier, where I would then teach in 1995 and 1996.

In 2005 I accepted a teaching position at Providence Academy in Plymouth, Minnesota.

Skipping ahead to 2007, I decided that Sight-Size needed a book. As with anything else that is passed from master to student, if the tradition is not written down the story gets changed. So I consulted Richard Lack, Charles Cecil, other former Gammell students I knew, as well as the copious notes I had taken during my various atelier experiences. The result was my first book, Cast Drawing Using the Sight-Size Approach and this website. Sight-Size and the Art of Seeing, the book’s companion DVD, followed shortly thereafter. Two years later I wrote and released the follow up book, Cast Painting Using the Sight-Size Approach. Both books as well as the DVD are now long out of print.

As mentioned, along with the books and DVD I setup this website. In its current form it contains over 100 articles relevant to Sight-Size.

Throughout my own atelier training the benefits of a trained visual memory was impressed upon me. So in 2013 I wrote and released the book Memory Drawing: Perceptual Training and Recall (wonderfully edited by Linda Crank). You can learn all about training your visual memory from that book. At the time I also created an extensive website regarding the practice of memory drawing. You can find it here.

Like memory drawing, another skill that’s sorely lacking in the atelier community is intentional eye accuracy training. Most students get that training indirectly through cast and figure drawing. But that’s not nearly enough. To solve the problem, in early 2016 I published An Accurate Eye, an eBook containing progressive eye training exercises that I’ve given to my students.

Near the end of 2016 I released a book titled, The Sight-Size Cast. It is a completely rewritten and greatly expanded compilation of my first two books, Cast Drawing Using the Sight-Size Approach and Cast Painting Using the Sight-Size Approach. For more information, see here. It is also available as a paperback and hardcover from online booksellers.

The aforementioned materials have been used in numerous ateliers, academies, and art schools, worldwide. Equally important is that I am honored to have been able to help over ten thousand individuals learn to see through Sight-Size.

Back in 2017 the Swedish edition of the Epoch Times republished a number of my articles from this site for their newspaper.

In 2018 I opened an online atelier, Atelier Rousar | online, and through it offered a couple of cast drawing courses. Then, in 2019, I added a memory drawing course to the atelier’s lineup.

Although the Sight-Size site is all Sight-Size all the time, fully trained artists know that the ability to scale is important as well. Once your eye is accurately trained to see through Sight-Size, scaling is a simple matter. However, distinct and progressive training to scale is of great benefit to students. In 2021 I released the eBook, A Comparative Eye, to provide that training.

Internet server issues forced me to close the Atelier Rousar course site in mid-2022. So I recut the cast drawing videos to make them available outside of the online course format – and at a much lower price. Those videos are available here. Concurrent with the release of the videos, I adapted the textual and photographic content of the course into a book. That book, Cast Drawing in Sight-Size: An Atelier Manual is available in paperback from all online booksellers (Amazon here), and an eBook is here. That eBook, by the way, is also a bonus that comes along with the course videos.

In decades past I had gallery representation in Minnesota and Florida, worked on commission (mostly portraiture), and painted numerous Christian themed paintings. My portrait commissions stopped (or rather, I stopped them) in the early 2000’s because I refused to paint from photographs. Others enjoy it, but for me painting from a photo is a chore and not worth my time.

Although I had some success as a painter of Christian subjects I have reconsidered my position in light of the 2nd Commandment. And so, when not teaching I now focus on landscape, still life, and other work that is usually not for sale.

Since my second year at Atelier LeSueur I have always taught. Oftentimes that teaching was cast drawing, though I have also taught all of the other common atelier subjects. Regardless of the subject, Sight-Size remains the backbone of my teaching because I believe that to draw, paint, or sculpt well, one must first learn to see. Sight-Size is the best way to do that.