i'm starting this master
copy of monet water lilies. he painted a lot of water lilies, this is one of
his smaller ones. i'm using a pretty cheap white, this is a titanium white. this is a pretty big
painting so i'm setting out a lot of it. i would rather have too much paint on my palette than too
little. i've got a cool red this is an alizarin red or an alizarin crimson, different brands use
different terms. i've got a very warm red, this is vermilion; you can also use a cadmium red light
if you're looking for a very warm red like this. i've got a cadmium yellow medium for
my yellow. this is a warm yellow. putting out a lot of that because you tend to run
out of yellow first. i've got a viridian green. i'll also be mixing some greens with my blues and
yellow. i'm gonna have two blues: i'm gonna have a cobalt blue and i'm gonna have an ultramarine
blue. this is a pretty decent approximation of monet's palette at the time that he was doing
these paintings. monet used flat brushes, especially by this time in his career; he was
using very large brushes but i'm not going to use brushes as large as the ones that he used because
i'm working on a scaled down canvas. this canvas is 18 by 18". he was working on these canvases
that might be six feet square so he was using very large brushes. i'm going to use this size brush
right now: this is a number 10, it's a flat brush. so now what i've got is a canvas with a warm
gray tint. i'm not going to cover this whole canvas with this green; i'm looking very closely
at the image of his painting and even underneath the areas where you're going to have those
brilliantly colored flowers and lily pads, he's got that dark green. so i'm going to get
dark green underneath where those lily pads are going to be, and then on a lot of area of the
water, but not all of the area of the water. okay so i'm gonna pick up some of that on
my brush, i'm gonna pick up some of that, and i'm gonna pick up some of this. so i've got a variety of colors on my brush right now and i've
got a lot of paint on my brush. so here we go. i'm looking at the directions of his strokes
too because that's very very important when you are copying an impressionist, especially
a monet. you'll see those brush strokes and so you've got to think about how he moved
his arm to create those brush strokes. something you'll see in a monet
is a lot of thick and thin. he's going to have some areas where the
paint is going to be going on very opaque, very thick, it's going to even have visible
texture standing up off the canvas; he's going to have areas where the paint is very thin,
where it's even maybe letting the tint on the canvas show through. so you want to keep that
in mind when you're copying an impressionist. so you're seeing a couple of things here. you
are seeing a lot of canvas texture showing at the edges of my brush strokes; here; my brush
strokes are being broken up by the canvas texture. that's fine for right now. there are going to
be some painters where you'll continue to see that all the way through to the very end of the
painting; there will be some painters where you will never see brush strokes that are broken
up like that. monet is kind of in the middle. when you wipe the paint off your brush you
can actually use it to remove wet paint, so that's what i did right there and right there.
something that monet was very very skilled at was using the character of his brush
strokes, and the way that he moved the brush, to express the character of what he was looking
at. so this painting he's got a lot of these long vertical strokes and those imitate the quality of
the reflections that he was seeing in the water. he does a lot of things with just the movement
of his brush; that's something that he was really great at. so now i've got kind of
an allover layer of this green but i need to tweak it a little bit in some areas, because
in some areas it's a little more bluish when i look at my image of this painting; some areas
it's a little more yellowish or a little more brownish, a little more dull, so i'm just gonna
work on that a little bit before i move on. okay now i'm going to tweak
these greens a little bit so now what i've got is a canvas almost covered
with green, but it's covered with a lot of different greens. if you look at probably any
stroke that you see on this canvas, it's probably going to be a slightly different green than any
other stroke, and you've got to be able to do that if you're gonna do a quality impressionist style
painting. so i'm satisfied with the greens right now, i'm gonna move on to the blues, and that is
the last thing i'm gonna do today. i'm gonna do the lilies themselves in another session
once the other stuff is dry. so my blues here are a combination of ultramarine, cobalt, and
white. that's what i'm seeing there. with the green that's on my canvas right now, the green is
wet, it's much wetter than that warm gray layer so it's going to mix with the blue and it's going
to affect it a little bit. i'm going to start with the dark, more ultramarine blues that are
up in the corner. and you can already see that the blues are mixing substantially with the
greens. so what i may even do is add some blues today and then do another layer when this
layer is dry, get those blues more vivid. so we have that, those dark blues following
the bottom of this group of lilies here. right now i'm also using my brush to sketch
in the large shapes of those lily pads as you can see i'm picking up a lot of
that green that's wet on the canvas when i apply the blue. so i'm not going to try
to make the blue perfectly match what i see on the image of monet's painting
today, because it's going to be way too difficult with the way it's mixing
on the canvas. i'm going to add blue and then i'm going to come back on another day
and go over it again, get a stronger blue. side note about these colors: the brilliant
colors of the impressionists were possible because of the second industrial revolution,
the chemical revolution. it was now much easier to get these bright colors. suddenly cadmium
colors were available, synthetic ultramarine was available which made it much much cheaper than
traditional ultramarine; prior to this bright colors had to be made using crushed semi-precious
stones, so obviously those colors were very very expensive. but now these colors were cheap, you
could use a lot of them, a lot of painters had access to them. you didn't have to have a huge
commission to be able to use bright colors. standing back taking a good look
from a distance at what i've got. the more you stand back the
better. i'm going to get a little bit more blue in there and then
i'm going to call it a day for today. okay, i'm going to call it a day.
it doesn't look like much yet, but if you look at an unfinished
monet, doesn't look like much either. day two of this monet copy. so last time i put in
the greens and the blues, the reflections in the water; today i'm going to start addressing the
lily pads, and then i might get to the flowers today or i might need to leave that for a third
session. we'll see. this canvas took probably about five days to dry. i used a lot of cobalt
blue and cobalt blue is a very slow drying paint. ultramarine dries very quickly, but cobalt
and alizarin crimson, and cadmium yellow to a certain extent, tend to dry very slowly,
so this took a few days. it's completely dry, completely dry to the touch right now, i can
scratch it, no paint coming off at all. and i have not gone over this canvas with any
kind of oil or medium or anything at all. i'm just going to be applying paint on top of
dry paint, because when i took a close look at the monet painting that i'm copying, that's
what he did. i see a lot of brush strokes that indicate that he was placing paint on top of dry
paint. now i don't have a visible drawing anymore, so the first thing i'm going to do is
take some slightly thinned out paint, and i'm just going to sketch back in where
these lily pads are going to go for myself. so you can see there, because i used that
ultramarine blue, those couple of areas where i needed to adjust the sketch that i did, i could
just wipe and the blue pretty much disappeared into my green and blue background that i'd already
painted, so you're really not going to see that at all once i'm done with this painting. so now i
have to decide which color i'm going to attack, and normally we'd go from larger to smaller
areas of color just for convenience. this is a little challenging because there isn't
exactly one color that's dominating these water lilies. if i had to choose one i'd probably
choose kind of the light sort of teal turquoise green that you're going to see especially in this
area; but you know we've got yellows down here, we've got a lot of pinks and purples over here,
we've got a whole rainbow of colors in this area, full rainbow of colors in these areas,
so i just kind of have to pick something. so i'm going to go ahead and go with that light
greenish teal color. so let's go into this. so something you can see right now
is, we've got a bunch of different colors here. we've got a light green,
we've got some light blues and pinks, we've got almost a peach color here. i
did not have to go back to my palette in between strokes to get those different colors.
i had them all on my brush in the first place. i'm thinking about where else i can use the colors that i've already mixed before i
make any changes to what i've done. so because i'm applying my paint today on top
of paint that's fully dry from last session, the paint that's fully dry has a little bit of a
texture, and so when you look at my brush strokes, they have this broken up character which
is caused by the paint going on top of this textured dry paint from last session. and for
monet this is what i want, because i've looked closely at his strokes for this painting,
and i see that character in his marks. monet will give you a lot of flexibility with
your colors because you don't have to have a smooth surface. with some other painters, if
you make a color mistake and you cover it up, it will affect the surface that you have; you
might be able to see that little mistake, it might distract from the smoothness of what you're
trying to get; but monet has a very textured surface. you can really see the work that went
into the painting. you can look at the strokes and you can see almost in your mind the actions of
him painting over and over, day after day. so that gives you the flexibility to go over a color if
it's not quite right, and not worry about whether there's going to be a texture or there's going
to be a little sign of a mistake left behind. i added this cobalt purple to my palette
because a purple as vibrant and chromatic, as intense as this would be impossible to
mix from the primary colors. even though red and blue technically do mix to make a purple, they would not mix a purple that i could use and
get the same effects that monet did of color. so now i'm looking at this painting and
i'm thinking about what i've already done and what my color strategy should be. i said
i was going to start by working on the greens, but i kind of shifted towards
working on the pinks and purples. so i think now i'm going to
work on the yellows and greens. so you don't want to have just one
green in your painting, just one purple, just one orange, especially not for
impressionism. i have two reds here, i have two blues here, a mixed purple and
a mixed green. i only have one yellow out; that's because i took a very close look at
monet's painting and i determined that i could get all of his yellows using cadmium yellow. that's
the range that i saw his yellows in. i didn't see any yellows that i thought needed to be more
of a yellow ochre or more of a lemon yellow. what i'm going to do now is i'm going to come back to
the blues in the water. i had to pause on that at the end of day one because i needed to be able to
put colors over with a drier brush, and my colors were mixing with the very wet paint that i had
on my canvas. but now i can come back into that. i'm looking always at the direction of the
brush strokes. because the brushstrokes are so visible in a monet, their direction
is very important for creating form. and one thing i notice is that in the upper left
and lower left corners the strokes are a little more diagonal; and i think it's probably
just because monet was reaching a little farther into those corners of the painting.
i'm not sure he was trying to indicate any kind of form with that change in direction,
i think it might have just been an accident. now i'm going to go into the greens in
the water. i established greens in my first session but i'm going to go in today
and create a little bit more variation, and have some more vibrant greens also, because
last time my greens were a little bit dulled because they were mixing into that overall
warm gray tint that i started with. okay. so i'm going to leave the blues
and greens of the water for now, and i'm going to go back into the rainbow
of those lily pads. you might notice that i did not completely cover up the greens and
the blues that i applied on my first day, because i want to be able to see the
layers. it gives us a sense of the depth and the partial transparency of the water. so
i'm not trying to cover everything that i did. the shapes of the lily pads, particularly in here
and up here, are quite undefined. what i mostly have are these horizontal marks, rather than
kind of round shapes like the lily pads will actually be in the end. and what i'm going to do
towards the end of the painting, what monet did from what i can tell from his brush strokes, is
he laid down these colors and then he went in with dark blues and defined the shapes of
the lily pads. so i'm going to do that later. now there are areas of this painting where the
warm gray tint that i did at the very beginning still shows through. down here, over here, some
other kind of scattered places. and i did that because i looked closely at monet's original
painting and he let those areas of the canvas show through. and what you get when you let
areas of the canvas show through, you get an effect of lightness. if you start with a light
tint on your canvas or if you start with a white canvas even, like van gogh often did, you get a
lightness, you get kind of a luminosity shining through your canvas by not covering up all of
that with darker color. so that's what monet was getting from his canvas. it also gives
a little bit more of that transparency that i was talking about earlier with the water. you
have brush strokes that are thicker, more opaque; you have paint that went on earlier that's
thinner; and then you have these areas where there's very little paint at all, letting the
tint show through. so that works for you also. if you have any questions leave them
in the comments below. if you enjoy our channel please like and subscribe.
we'll be posting new videos regularly. for more information and more videos visit our
patreon. thanks for watching! have a good day. you may have noticed that some of my paint
tubes are pretty old and pretty messy. this could be 20 years old, this tube,
i'm not even sure. but it's still fine. nooo. should i do it again? okay.
