Alla-Prima Portrait Painting Demo | John Singer Sargent Master Copy

[Music] hello everyone this week we'll be doing a master copy of a John Singer Sargent painting because I taught myself in the past by doing these master copies I encourage you to paint along with me so I've just listed the colors that I used in this painting but feel free to use whichever palette you'd like the most important thing you'd want to get out of a master copy of a John Singer Sargent is acute attention to the values so I use an odorless paint thinner on the left side of my cup here and the right side I have a 1/5 stand oil to 4/5 paint thinner mixture for my set up I have my iPad to the left of my canvas and my canvas is as close to my eye level as I can get it it's important to note that John Singer Sargent was a direct painter which means that he would start on his canvases directly with oil paint but it is known that for his larger figurative pieces or multi figurative pieces he did do preliminary drawings [Music] and now I don't want you to make this entire painting and the same duration of time of which this video is playing that is I don't want you to make the painting in 26 minutes this one copy actually took me around 6 hours and most of the time was spent just trying to get my drawing right and so it's important to know that although we're painting directly with paint and we're using lots of colors and shapes of value that the overall drawing that is the overall linear structure of this painting is extremely intricate if you'd like to see a video on my ulema painting technique that's a little more simple to understand than this one I'll link I'll leave a link in the description below to my latest electrum of portrait painting tutorial [Music] so if you're going to be following along this video with the it's with the intention of making the same master copy that I'm making I recommend spending some time getting the outside shape so that's what I'm working with at the moment I'm trying to get the outside shape as simple yet as accurate as possible so that I can build more complex shapes inside now I don't want it to be a perfect outline of the outside shape but I want it to be something that I can work with and right now I'm actually mixing up right away the dark brown or slightly warm black background that is in the back of this painting now academically master copies are meant to be made in museums or in galleries where you're actually copying directly from the painting but I don't have that luxury with this painting and I'm working from a photograph and I know that the photograph is contrasting the painting a little bit it's increasing the contrast so I am aware of that as I'm painting so I'm not going to make my finished painting as contrasted as the photograph I'm working for me although the photograph is a very well taken photograph so as my painting stands right now I have the general outside shape established and I've just put in a a flat value for the shadow color and I have the gesture outlined as well so right now I'm going to be mixing up a generic warmer darker flesh tone that I'll be covering on the light side of the face with the intention of building lighter and cooler colors on top of it it is rumored that Sargent worked in this way where he would build up the values of the face first before placing any features but the but please note that he did have a lot of ability in simple linear drawing that is just drawing with a charcoal pencil or graphite pencil with just light and shadow so if you're attempting this master copy for the first time without doing a drawing in simple lines I would recommend to do this copy this painting and pencil or charcoal pencil and just sticking with light and shadow so now that I have my outside shape established and my canvas covered with paint I'll be mixing the plains that are turning into the shadow so I'll be mixing simple plains that are turning in to the shadow in a way that helps me create a sort of mannequin like structure which I can place the features now this stage can be pretty frightening but just know that you're building a structure of which you're going to create more accurate shapes on top of [Music] those of you that are watching this video with the intent of making the same master copy I will tell you certain instances where you can actually pause the video and use my painting as a reference but I wouldn't suggest trying to copy my painting as I'm working rather I will I will leave certain time intervals or you can pause the video now I know that it'll be kind of hard to copy from your computer screen so that is why I'm telling you that the painting demonstration itself is just a reference to guide you through a sergeant master copy [Music] at this point you may pause the video and copy directly from the painting if you'd like and now I'll be using a little bit of burnt umber mixed with a little tiny size one brush to re-establish my drawing so I'm going ahead and making placements for where the eyebrows are going to be placed which are indicating the structures of the eye sockets I made a little mark for the form shadow of the side of the face so at this point I will be taking my time with the drawing and I'm going to be trying to use the same accuracy as I would if I were working in charcoal pencil or in graphite [Music] whether I'm working in graphite charcoal or oil paint when I go for the accuracy I tend to start with the eye sockets or the eye structures so I try to place the eyes within the outside shape of the head and I use the the eyes and the eyebrow and the tear ducts to kind of put my foot down in the drawing and say okay I'm gonna leave these marks here and I'm gonna figure out where the other marks go relative to these marks [Music] now when I paint or draw I tend to be more optical than I am measurements oriented but I do consider horizontal lines so I'm thinking of where the end of the left eye and the right eye intersect on a horizontal axis and I think of the distance of the tear ducts which are the corners the inside corners of the eyes I think of where they intersect on a vertical axis with the ends of the nose so though I'm a very optical painter I do consider horizontal axes and vertical axes whenever I'm drawing but you the viewers don't have to be that way you can actually measure the distances however you'd like and there's no shame in tracing the outlines of the of the picture directly from your computer screen I just know that you won't be cheating or anything like that it's a learning exercise so if it helps you to copy the outlines of the face and that's okay and then you can work on the accuracy after that after the fact [Music] so I'm trying to draw the curvatures of the eyebrows and the curvatures of the eyelids as exactly as I can to the actual Sargent painting but please note that doing these Sargent copies are a very very good exercise in simplification because Sargent left out a lot of stuff in his paintings but the further away you get from his paintings it doesn't even matter your eyes fill in the missing gaps and that's only really achieved through a painter that's really really simplifying thinking about structure and stepping back a lot stepping back and being at an arm's length away from your painting is extremely vital at this point you may now pause the video and catch up to where I am so here's the actual Sargent painting itself with the outlines lined out and the values flattened you may use this for reference as well so here's my painting with the features generally placed on the face so let's start some form modeling so the X that I've drawn out is indicating the lightest plane on the face and the arrows are indicating the direction of which the form is turning away from the light therefore getting darker and this is the actual Sargent painting itself I just use an app to draw that on whenever I'm modeling form such as the form of the forehead I start with the area that's facing the light the most and I'll paint that as light as I can although I'm not using straight white I'm using a mostly orange and white with a little cadmium yellow and I'm painting this right on to the warmer darker flesh tones that I mixed with the intent of radiating the values across the lightest area and using the paint underneath to help me create that gradation of values so looking at the forms of the eyes I've marked out the lightest planes with an X and then I've drawn the direction of which the forms are turning therefore getting a little bit darker since they're curving away from the light and just know that you have to really look at the rate at which the values are turning for example the areas underneath the eyebrows are a much faster turn they're turning into the to the shadow a lot more rapidly than the areas underneath of the bottom eyelid those are planes that are a little more flat therefore they are slower turns so the slower the turn the less obvious the change in value becomes notice how obvious the change in values is underneath the eyebrow in comparison to underneath the bottom eyelid so john singer sargent once said the thicker you paint the more inflows and so I'm trying to use a crapload of paint really I'm using a lot of paint and well I'm using the most paint after I've drawn out kind of where I think the features are gonna go and the more values I put in the more structure I put in the more obvious the drawing will become so even though I placed the features as I'm modeling the form I can tell if the feature is say the width of a brush mark from its true position in space and once I get to that point it's really not that difficult to correct the drawing [Music] [Music] so what I'm doing right now is I'm using a loaded brush a brush loaded with a a white and a burnt number and a little bit of cadmium orange flesh-tone mix to curve the forms around the face and I'm using the paint underneath to help the paint travel across the brush and create these curvatures of the form and creating these subtle value shifts [Music] it appears that the the model that sergeant painted and this painting is a young child and so whenever you're painting a child their eyes tend to be a little bit larger than that of an adult because when we're when we're babies our eyeballs are the same size they are when we're older so our eyes don't really grow so that's that's one thing to note and the other is that their faces are more round so there's less jawbone there's no real wrinkles yet so we are considering that with these curvatures of the form I am curving them more round than I would painting an older model [Music] though I'm curving the forms and trying to create a three-dimensional object in space I'm also thinking of the large value relationships as I paint so the area of the the forehead is a plane that is most facing the light so it's most perpendicular to the light source and there's also areas parallel to that portion of the forehead on the on her cheeks so these areas are much lighter so let's simplify these values as the forehead the cheek is one the nose is two in the area underneath the eyebrow is three so as we go from one to three we get darker more subtly as I've mentioned and videos before in an ala cream portrait painting each layer that you put on your painting should in theory developed the drawing so you'll see right now as I'm putting in the values of the lower eyelid in relation to the the cheek I'm also using these brush marks to correct that shape and make it more exacting so when we're painting ala prima that is when we're painting went on what we're we're constantly thinking about the drawing in relation to the shapes around them see how I just carved the lower eyelid with that brush mark so I'm making the drawing more accurate and at the same time I'm building the smaller value relationships also when I do form modeling in areas such as at the bottom of her eyelid or the top of her eyebrow I work areas next to each other so we human beings are symmetrical we have we have bilateral symmetry so I'll think of a portion say the bottom eyelid of her right eye in relation to the bottom eyelid of her left eye so what you saw in the previous clip was me working on her left eye but now I'm also going back and forth to the right eye so I'm working both sides of the face in relation to each other I don't want to model a form by itself and then moving around finishing each portion at a time although that is something that you do in the end and you can do that many people do that successfully but I just find that to be more difficult for me in particular the hard part about copying the John Singer Sargent painting is getting the forms as simple as he did but in a in a sense Sargent paintings are a little bit elusive and it looks like he painted with lots of bold brush marks very simply but if you really take the time to look at those bold brush marks there's lots of value gradations there's lots of small tiny structures that he has but very well hidden and his big brush marks and they show they show in a way that creates the form and creates volume so now you can take a second to pause the video to catch up [Music] [Music] so now I'm starting to model the areas below the nose so I picked the lightest portion being the area of the philtrum and its facing the light the most the filter being the area directly between the center of the bottom of the nose and the top center of the upper lip and I'm picking this region because it's the lightest and I have once again a loaded brush with a white cadmium orange and a a little bit of burnt umber flesh tone mixture and like I did above I'm using the I'm using a gentle brush mark to roll around the forms and using the paint underneath to create these subtle value shifts [Music] the area I'm painting right now is a plane that's facing the light more than the area to the left of it so it's a it's a plane that's curving very very very subtle the curvature is very subtle but it is much lighter all I'm really saying is that her cheeks the cheeks of her face are protruding and turning in to the avicularia Saurus or the area around the mouth and it's a very complicated form to think of so if it sounds a little complicated just know that the face her face isn't an exact fear but rather it's it's spherical in nature but her cheeks are facing the light more and then they're curving into the mouth and then they're curving back out from the mouth as you approach the center of the mouth [Music] and as you roll around the side of the models face the form is turning further away from the light very rapidly so that's why I painted that darker plane to the left of the screen right now and I'm going ahead and carving the shape of the side of the face more accurately while I'm at it but I will make the curvature more subtle sometimes when I want to distinguish a large plane from another I tend to overdo it so I'll make the turn much darker that is the left portion of the face relative to your screen so the so the area on the right of the models face I painted a darker plane but I will be making that curve much more subtle and it's also helpful to look at negative shapes so I was looking at the shape of the side of the eye and drawing a plumb line to the face so I'm really thinking of the outside shape and I'm trying to establish the final touches on that I'm using a little bit of SAP green burnt umber some alizarin crimson and some cadmium red light to mix the the color for the shadow area of her top lip and I'm just going to flatten it out for the time beam and then I'm going to paint the subtle curvatures of the amounts within that shape [Music] I'll be using a lighter mixture of cadmium red light on top of white some titanium white and yellow ochre that's already on my pallet as I'm mixing to create the light portions of the top of her lip and it's important to know that we are painting from a computer screen and painting from a photograph of the actual Sargent painting so I'm not completely convinced with the colors that I'm looking at on my computer screen but I am trying to study the relative values in comparison to one another because the values will really tell the story of the forms [Music] and though you're painting smaller shapes make sure to stand back even as much as you did in the beginning standing back is really it's a really integral part of making a Sargent type of painting and now I'm filling in the areas around the canvas with black and I'm not using direct black I'm using a little bit of burnt umber and some some alizarin crimson in the mixture because I suspect Sargent didn't use straight black in the background and I'm not as careful with the color I'm not as careful with this portion and that's that's because it's not too vital to the painting it's more important that you study the structures of the face it's more important that you study the simplifications that Sargent made in his portraits rather than the nuances of the clothing that the models wore it is rather interesting to see the brush marks that sergeant made on that painting this one painting in particular because I can clearly tell that he either had a layer underneath of it as in he didn't paint a seller prema or he painted on top of another painting which is most likely what happened Sargent is known to have painted on top of previous paintings and with the portion of the ear he really just just like that put a single brush mark and then just carved it out he didn't really put too much information on the ear although in his painting it really does read like in here remember if you're attempting to do this master copy it you don't have to focus on getting it exactly right the first time it does take a few try as this painting did take me one and last but not least of the hair I used just the flesh colors that I had on my palette was a tiny bit of white and I made some brush marks for the light planes of the the hair and just the light planes and I use that to hint at the rest of the hair thanks again for watching this week's portrait painting demonstration stay tuned for more weekly videos and if you'd like to see more of my paintings more often look me up on Instagram as you party fine art

Channel: Yupari Artist

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Keywords: John Singer Sargent, John Singer Sargent Painting, Yupari, Yupari Artist, Alla Prima Painting, Oil Painting, Oil Painting Tutorial, How to paint a portrait, John Singer Sargent master copy, classical oil painting techniques, art videos, realistic painting, how to paint pictures of people, portrait painting, portrait painting tutorial, alla prima portrait painting demo, yuparifineart

Id: McrZ-iZBpOo

Length: 27min 27sec (1647 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 30 2017