🤩JC LEYENDECKER TUTORIAL| Joseph Christian Leyendecker Style Study 😱

is the final week of the month and for the very first time this year it's style study time and today's style study is a little different because rather than looking at a contemporary artist that we all love we're throwing it back to the early 20th century because today we're going to take a look at the beautiful Art Nouveau work of JC line decker this video was requested three separate times so a massive thank you to Belle and our Discord server as well as Itachi Uchiha and I like fat tigers here on YouTube for requesting this video I really hope you guys love it and that it's everything you've been looking for also I want to say last week's video Broke me so this week instead of doing the customary two paintings I'm only gonna do the study I hope that's okay forgive me you guys but your girl is broken and exhausted but all my style study veterans this one's a little different but thank you so much for coming back I love you and you can go ahead and Skip to part one time enzymes are always in the description below but if you're new here hi welcome I am so glad you're here because today we're going to level up your art by like a million Star City is a regular series we do here on my channel where we take a look at some of our favorite artists analyze their work and see what we can learn from it keywords learn we're not here to plagiarize or copy anyone's style we're only here to learn some really cool art tips and tricks and see how we can apply them to finding our own unique art style I'm gonna structure today's video in two parts in part one we'll take a look at lines echo's work analyze his style and see what we can learn from it and in part two we'll do a study of one of his original paintings the reference I've chosen today is this one as always if you enjoy this video and learn something today please remember to like And subscribe comment below your biggest takeaway from this video or any other Insight you have into Lion's echo's work but without much further Ado grab a snack sit back and let's say into another style study featuring J.C lion Decker Joseph Christian lion Decker was a German American Artist born in Germany in 1874 but his family emigrated to America when he was eight years old while he started out working as an engraver and a commercial illustrator Joe eventually went to the Chicago Art Institute and later the academy Julia in Paris in 1899 Joe got his first commission and illustration for the cover of the Saturday evening pose which led to a long relationship with the magazine which he worked with for 44 years creating over 320 illustrations for that cover alone he also worked on several ad campaigns the most prominent ones being the arrow collar man and the Kellogg's kids campaign he also did some work for the U.S military campaigns creating recruitment posters while doing my research for this video I came across this incredible gem by Kaz Rowe who goes into a lot of details about land Decker's life beyond just the art I'll link it below please make sure you go check it out you guys it is such a good video but we're here for the art so let's get into that there is some debate over which our movement Joe's work falls under is it the flourishing Dynamic Art Nouveau or is it the more modern geometric art deco personally while I see influences from both these Styles I'm not a huge fan of labels when it comes to art movement but I will say that Joe's art was almost always centered around a narrative sure a lot of this probably came from the design briefs for the commissions that he worked but even in his personal art you see a lot of Storytelling through both composition and design choices what's really striking about his body of work is his depictions of the male form as this idealized sensual object of desire it isn't super often that we see male subjects in popular art today but lion Decker was said to be one of the first illustrators who turned the male physique into a sex symbol like when his ad campaign pains were printed apparently women would literally call at the company all the time asking to be set up with the model in their ads what's interesting about this however is that the model was usually a man called Charles beige who eventually ended up being Joseph's partner and you'll see that the vast majority of his masculine character illustrations are based off his model and Muse Charles seriously Joe painted Charles over and over again religiously and I suppose in that sense he was a bit of a ritualist speaking of this here are four key characteristics to JC lyondecker's art like I mentioned before pretty much all of Joe's art was centered around telling a story and pretty much every single time the story was centered around the character the characters would rarely just be stood there in a static pose and he rarely ever painted super close-up bus or headshots this tells us pretty clearly that the focus of the piece wasn't what the character looked like but what they were doing and how they were interacting in a scene so here you see two men dressed really sharply having a conversation here you see a couple mid Waltz in fact what I find really interesting is how even in ad campaigns were usually the models simply stand there wearing the garments or holding up the merchandise Joe still paints them to be doing something or engaged in some way and that to me screams layered ads because while yes the models are wearing these fashionable clothes the focus of the illustrations is how they look happy confident even wealthy and successful so really what they're really trying to sell is the experience you would have if you bought this product I don't know about you but dang that is genius this is further enhanced by the strong silhouette element where the characters are clearly distinguished from the often flat or simply textured background suggesting that they stand apart from the crowd plus the characters are never super close up always sticking to the mid ground this almost creates a sense of separation from us the viewers making them look Untouchable almost at these models are better than you kind of feel I'm sure you can guess why these would be super important aspects of good advertising one more point I want to mention here is about the invisible leading lines created by the gays the gays as in the eye line not the gays although that too okay sorry no the gays actually forms a huge part of the story especially when there's multiple characters involved so here we have both characters looking in the same direction where it seems something interesting is going on here while one character looks straight ahead unaware of the viewer the other looks straight at us this tells us that this second character is probably the more cautious of the two the eyes are usually the windows to our soul and in this case the windows to the soul of the painting which is the narrative most often you'll see that land Decker uses a lot of warmer colors and lighting particularly in the skin in fact both the mid-tones and shadows tend to be super warm pretty much yellow and while there might be areas of cooler tones these are generally limited to the background and maybe the specular highlights to contrast the skin this could just be a sign of the times where indoor lighting though electric was still super warm toned and you could only really paint outside if it was a warm sunny day or maybe he just really liked warm colors that much because they do make the skin feel super alive and radiant man I wish someone had invented the Internet much sooner can you imagine the Vlogs we'd see from the Old Masters anyway let's talk about the other color aspect to Joe's work and that is the drama now when we look at his paintings they actually look really dramatic but when you look a little closer you see that the Shadows on the characters or their clothes aren't really that much darker than the neighboring highlights or mid-tones in order to have drama we need a solid separation between the highlights and Shadows on an object like you'd see in a Rembrandt portrait for instance but here if we color pick the values in the skin for instance we see that they are really not that far off from each other but when you zoom out the painting still has drama well what I learned was that there is still massive value contrast but rather than being within the same material the contrast actually occurs across several objects in the scene so here while the skin and jumpsuit are rather pale all the way across there is a sharp contrasting shadow in the bag the floor the background and even the hair thing is even within the super dark elements the contrast is low it isn't the contrast between highlights and shadows but the contrast between dark and light objects that creates the drama that way nothing looks super textured or scribbly or rough but you do still get that interesting Dynamic value scale now this is specifically what Belle asked for on the Discord server so I had to give it its own Point love you Belle but one incredibly powerful part of lion Decker's work is how he paints fabric which makes sense since a lot of his commissions were for clothing companies and heavily featured cloth of some kind now there are three important aspects to how he paints folds that I found really interesting first was the number of folds thicker fabric on things like jackets and coats has fewer folds while thinner fabric on shirts and blouses has significantly more folds this makes sense because thinner fabric is more likely to shift and change with the body whereas thicker fabric tends to hold its form really well the second aspect was the depth of these folds which are shown through contrast however this is a very specific type of contrast because it involves areas is a flat color so in folds that are super sharp and deep such as pleats and collars you'll see that the sharp edge is created by using only two colors that highly contrast each other with the shallower folds like those caused by bending and posing there are often three or four colors where one or two mid-tones lie between the highlight and Shadow softening that edge out remember more mid tones equals a softer transition and the final aspect to the folds that really stood out to me is the shape language with a lot of the folds you see on sleeves or trouser legs these are made of very flat triangular or zigzag shapes in the fabric of the broader more static body parts like the chest and back however the folds tend to be rounder with less harsh contrast and what I found really interesting was that the finer fabric was actually painted to have much softer smoother blending so this is things like Silk skirts and satin dresses but you see these subtle of folds that blend out whereas things that are less fine like these sporty shorts or these less extravagant dresses will have the harder Edge more high contrast zigzaggy folds so not only does Joe use folds to show the thickness of the fabric they also reflect the quality and by extension the cost of the fabric foreign I quickly want to run through the textures in Lion Deckers are because there are so many a large part of why there is so much texture in his work is probably because he worked with oil paint which could layer on thick and create race texture but more importantly he knew how to use this quality of oil paint to create selective texture in his work most commonly you'll find Textures in the lighter backgrounds where brush marks add movement to what would otherwise be really flat white or beige surroundings however the texture is created by brush work not by painter design or patterns and if you've watched any of the other style studies you know I love these little details that show the hands of the artist however and probably more interestingly you actually also see a lot of texture in the skin if we look closely at the shadows in these faces there is a lot of visible brush work in there which seems counter-intuitive in today's age of super smooth perfected skin in fact in some of his paintings you'll even see this hatching with white painted diagonally on the skin or just loads of textured brush marks on the skin in general now this texture isn't on every single painting and honestly I don't really know quite why but what I can speculate on is the intended effect because adding all this texture to the skin is a really cool fun way to add loads of movement to what would otherwise be a pretty flat smooth area especially since he doesn't often paint very high contrast shadows in the skin so yeah I thought that was a fun detail to talk about but to someone part one of this video here are four key characteristics to JC liondecker's art number one the composition is centered around storytelling including aspects like the silver were posing the position of the character in the scene and even the direction of their gaze two while Joe uses a lot of warm lighting the majority of the drama comes from the contrast between light and dark elements in the scene rather than from contrast between highlights and shadows three he uses the contrast and shape language of the folds in clothing to tell us about the thickness and quality of the fabric and number four he paints some really cool texture in the skin and background to add dynamism and just a fun Flair to the characters foreign that I've chosen it is a portrait of child's Beach from 1918 and it is him in a World War One American Sailors uniform right off the bat I found it really helpful to have that oval frame because it really helped me place his silhouette and features a lot easier than I could have without after I'd done a rough sketch and then a second sketch layer on top I started by establishing the background this really helped me figure out just how warm to go with the skin because the background was a cool tone sometimes if we start with a neutral gray background the warm tones can end up looking right for the moment but then you place a cool background in and suddenly the warms are too warm why because color theory is a scam that will Gaslight you into thinking you're fully colorblind but anyway since the original was an oil painting I decided to use some of my knowledge from last is classical Optima and start with an under painting whatever colors I saw in the reference I put down an exaggerated version of each one not only did the underpainting act as a really nice place marker it also meant that when I went over these colors with the actual skin tones these ended up peeking through the layers and adding some really nice depth and life to the colors of the face gonna be honest though the eyes and brows really Bamboozled me because there were actually a lot of lost edges and while that is a really fun technique to incorporate into an original painting it makes studying the piece an actual nightmare don't get me wrong the eyes in the original are absolutely gorgeous the eyes in my Recreation are absolutely not what I really did not anticipate however was just how warm and yellow everything was like you don't understand however much yellow you would think you needed you actually need a a lot more the lighting here is what I would call turmeric realness oh sorry turmeric since most of you guys are in the wild wild west not but seriously I still don't understand how Joe made this skin look like skin despite it basically being 300 kinds of yellow one area I know I absolutely failed was with the values if you look at the reference there is this beautiful Soft Bloom of key light that hits the near side of his face and oh that looked deceptively simple when I tell you I wanted to scream and cry and throw up oh my God I have never found lighting so challenging seriously can someone explain in the comments why it was so difficult to replicate this glowy light thing I'd super appreciate some insight I do really like the end product though there are so many things I couldn't match to the original however I definitely learned a lot especially about color theory so definitely definitely try a lion that can study you guys it is so worth it and there we have it JC lyond Decker the most divide I know this was a quick one but I do hope you found it helpful regardless thanks so much again to Belle Itachi Uchiha and I like fat tigers for requesting this video I really hope you guys enjoyed it and that it's been everything you've been looking for and if the rest of you guys have enjoyed this video as well please remember to like And subscribe it really helps the channel out so so much mandatory reminder that you can now grab my entire custom brush pack on patreon as well as on gumroad and also come follow me on IG to keep up with all of my Arts if there are any other artists you'd like to see a style Studio first check out my style City playlist I've done like loads of these chances that I've probably covered some of your faves on the series already I'll leave a playlist down here in the outro but in case I haven't feel free to leave a comment below or come tell me on Discord which as you'd like to see a style studio and I'll probably go check them out and add them to my list as well that's about all I have to say today so thanks so much for hanging out with me I really hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have check out some more style studies down here and I'll see you guys on the next one bye

Channel: Srish Creates

Views: 11,362

Keywords: srish creates, srish, leyendecker, lgbt, art history, illustration, charles beach, digital painting, digital artist, krita, painter, timelapse, art tutorial, how to digital paint, illustrator, professional artist, jc leyendecker, leyendecker study, art study tutorial, best way to study art, how to do art master studies, master study, art study, art master study, layendecker, leyndecker, leyendeker, joe, christian

Id: Tp3Io8G1khc

Length: 20min 1sec (1201 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 29 2023