JOHN SINGER SARGENT: LEARNING THE STYLE AND TECHNIQUE OF THE G.O.A.T.

today i want to talk about the greatest painter of all time john singer sergeant i'm going to be breaking down observations other master painters have about his work and talk about how we can analyze understand and practice those elements of his style to bring the parts of them that speak most to us into our own work to illustrate the stylistic elements we love about sergeant i'm going to be creating a master study of one of sergeant's portraits for you for this video so whether you love sergeant want to paint more like him or you enjoy watching this master study time lapse i hope you give this video a thumbs up and hit the bell icon because these are exactly the sorts of things i share on my channel every week all right so before i begin i want to share with you all what i've learned about sergeant from other artists because that was a huge part of what helped me to successfully study this painting and it actually moved my entire painting journey forward in a really unexpected way in a short amount of time and i'm not special in this so if i'm having these takeaways and getting these results i know that they are really going to be applicable to your painting practice too so i hope you stick around so it has been a long two years of painting alone in my studio and i didn't fully realize that until i got to spend time with other painters in person again which is where the journey of this painting really starts in the past few months i've met so many amazing painters first at the portrait society of america conference in april and then just a couple weeks ago i got to work directly with carolyn anderson a painter that i've admired for quite a long time together in a workshop with her and what stood out to me was that not only was i inspired and enjoyed just being around like-minded people and really talented artists i actually learned a lot more than i realized or honestly could have expected when i was alone in my studio at portrait society i spent a full hour while i was there talking to artist paul newton and just geeking out with him about sergeant's work he is a phenomenal portrait painter in his own right and has been quite celebrated and i was lucky enough to chat with him about the finalists for this year's international portrait competition that portrait society of america puts on every year and we talked from painting to painting and just we're chatting about and analyzing what made each of these finalists so special we spent quite a bit of time in particular in front of a jamie korth painting discussing the brush work edges color choices and comparing them to some of our favorite sergeant paintings paul was especially interested in a blue pigment that he noticed in a particular sergeant piece that didn't seem to change chroma as you would have expected when you mix it with other pigments and something about jamie's painting had reminded him of that and he was just kind of like musing aloud with me wondering what sergeant might have used to make that one single mark in this one painting we also discussed a talk given by michael shane neal at the start of the conference in that talk shane broke down some of his favorite paintings but he lingered on a single sergeant portrait quite a bit breaking down his favorite edges in the piece sergeant's color choices and just the simplicity of the brushwork and the cohesion of the color palette this is probably one of my favorite parts of shane's talk when i think of sergeant i usually think of women in opulent dresses and i might have been tempted to dismiss this portrait of this man but this talk made me hungry to understand so much of sergeant's mastery here that i just don't think i had the skill or prowess to even see and notice before so for this video i rush back home after portrait society and set right to work on completing a master study of that very painting and that's what you're watching here and boy was this master studying process i was utterly hungry to get this as right as i could possibly get it and learn and master as much as i could reasonably expect so i picked a panel that was as close an aspect ratio to the original as i could get while being just a hair smaller just for the sake of ease and the amount of time that i would give myself to work on this and just as one quick note the aspect ratio wasn't identical so i made sure that i cropped the reference i had of sergeant's painting to match the aspect ratio of my panel so i understood exactly the proportions i should expect to see in my master study on top of that i knew that i was set up for a little bit more success with this piece than i was in my previous sergeant master study which i will link above in case you have not watched me paint that already but i knew this because there was simply less going on in this piece the background is plain i have more space in which to render the face i didn't have to break out like the one hair brush to try and capture the face um and the only other factor here is his uniform which is quite simple compared to the billowy ornate um satin finish skirt that i was painting in my previous sergeant master study so to begin this piece the very first thing that i set out to do was to actually put together a plan and the first piece of this plan was me asking whether any part of this painting needed to be transparent in right away i noticed that the background of sergeant's piece appeared to be slightly transparent this is something i can tell from just having a lot of practice under my belt working with transparent paints and understanding the kind of texture and shifts in color that happens when the paint isn't at full opacity so i knew i needed to get that transparent portion of the painting in early and then leave it alone because typically once you put paint down you can only get more opaque unless you're intentionally working in glazes which isn't house argent painted so my very first steps for this portrait you'll notice especially if you go back and just re-watch the very beginning of this video is that i sketch in the subject and i get a transparent wash in the background and it's not enough to just kind of like place them in and get it close enough like i spent time getting these right so making sure the value shifts and the brush strokes in the background are exactly what i want them to look like and the finished piece and i also had to make sure that i didn't have any drawing marks for the figure accidentally inserting themselves into the background in a way that i don't see in sergeant's rendition as a part of this the next thing that had to happen was that i had to make sure that my drawing was spot on and that's for the exact reason that i just named so especially the parts of the drawing that describe the contour of our subject here because once i finish that background i need it to be done and i could tell by the way the background strokes never came over top of the figure that it would have been painted first and it really wouldn't be touched up at all after except just to the left of the subject's ear in sergeant's painting i'm not sure why exactly i'm guessing it's either because that edge needed to be darkened next to the ear or honestly what i think might be more likely is that sergeant made a very slight drawing error the background had already set up he wasn't going to rework it and so he made a mark to actually opaquely cover up that drawing mistake so in the past i would have been a bit more flexible than this about the drawing and the process and the ordering of everything that went down on this painting but i'm at the point where i've been painting long enough that i could see that this background really needed to be complete and accurate before i moved on and i wouldn't give myself permission to move past it until i was 100 satisfied that this part of the painting was complete this is also true for the drawing so from here i begin to insert the drawing of the interior features of the face so the eyes the nose the facial hair the hairline etc and you'll notice especially if you look at exactly the point in this time lapse where i begin blocking this in that i really didn't focus on describing each feature i just made very simple like single lines showing where the features go and once again i check them i do not let close enough be good enough there are a lot of ways to check a drawing including measuring using mirrors working size size but i choose a method here that for me is very fast and comprehensive and that is that i take a snapshot of the painting i load it into photoshop and i transparently overlay it on top of the reference there i can quickly see how my drawing lines line up with every aspect of the sergeant portrait i can make the necessary corrections and then i can begin to go in and describe the features with more nuance shifting from you know simple lines indicating the features to more anatomically descriptive shapes i stick with the same basic tone of paint which is a combination of transparent oxide brown ultramarine and i think a little bit of viridian that's what i use for the background and this is what i keep using to lay in the initial drawing focusing on the dark areas and once i'm satisfied and once again i know that the drawing is accurate i begin to establish an overall flesh tone that corresponds with the light if you take a look at this exact stage at first this thinned out mixture that's terra rosa yellow ochre and titanium white will look a little ridiculous and washed out like the subject is wearing a mask but from here i can begin to modulate that flesh tone starting in the cheeks and the nose and the ears to bring in a little bit of life i believe i used permanent rose to do most of the heavy lifting and insert that warmth into the face and you'll see i use quite a bit of permanent rose after to put the lips in once these big shapes are in i shift gears once again and i start thinking about what the final marks were for each portion of the face i know i have the big masses down and the overall values and color are holding together well and i did enough work on my drawing in the very beginning double checking that to make sure that every ship everything should be in the correct place that that just leaves putting down the right brush work the final brush marks the viewer will see and that leaves me a lot of time to play with the edges and really start to understand sergeant's brush work on a deeper level so in this piece i want to talk about a few of the edges in particular first of all my very favorite part of this painting is the subject's hairline there's this absolutely gorgeous transition from skin tone through this sort of golden ochre into the mousy brown of the hair and i wanted to nail that transition it's something any other artist would probably paint in a much harder way in a more literal way uh showing individual wisps of hair but sergeant was a master of evoking what didn't have to be literally shown and understanding how human perception works in order to make that possible so he understood that if you're looking at the subject's eyes that you would take in that transition as a very soft edge at the hairline not something where you could see those individual hairs by contrast the eyes themselves would feature some harder marks particularly around the iris in the upper lash line but because of the way the form turns and because of the color of the hair things like the brows and the lower lash line once again stay quite soft and this was my really big focus for this piece understanding where the edges are hard where they're soft or where the mark is unblended but still appears as a soft edge because the values are so well controlled and this is what you see me doing for the whole rest of the painting going through mark my mark just thinking about exactly how to mix the right values and colors and use the brush in just the right way to make the marks that complete an area so normally when i paint i will kind of bring everything to a finish together sort of working around the whole painting in stages but with this i wanted to be so mindful about every mark that i put down since sergeant has literally shown me what marks to make that i wanted to be much more intentional about stopping and the easiest way for me to hold to that boundary for myself was to intentionally work in sections for instance i will take a look at the hair i will identify what needs to be done to have my hair match sergeants i will go ahead and make those marks i will double check that they look good that they don't need adjustment and then that's it they're done i won't go and noodle in the hair because something doesn't feel right if i take a look at what i've done and i compare it to sergeant and i see that they're the same i trust that what has to happen next happens on some other part of the painting and the thing is this worked i was really blown away with just how successful this master study was and not only for its own sake there are so many little things that i routinely see myself thinking about in paintings now specifically that i can draw back to this master study for credit as you've seen in this video master studies are a huge part of what can help us a leap forward in our painting practice whether we want to learn from the old masters or someone contemporary who embody some of the exact techniques we want to bring into our own work so if you want to learn more about how i make that happen i have a free master class breaking down exactly how to use exercises like this one to reach your painting goals and that's linked in the description and if you're serious and know you want to work directly with me to reach those goals there's also a link to apply to work with me through my mentorship program alright until next time thank you for watching and happy painting

Channel: Chelsea Lang

Views: 235,834

Keywords: oil painting, time lapse, art, painting tutorial, art tutorial, art time lapse, alla prima, chelsea lang, painting, oil painting techniques, chelsea lang painter, alla prima oil painting, chelsea lang artist, john singer sargent, portrait painting, oil painting technique, john singer sargent oil painting, john singer sargent painting technique, sargent painting technique, portrait painting oil, oil painting portrait, portrait painting tutorial, portrait painting time lapse

Id: Epi_L4Mrnmg

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 25 2022