Portrait Painting Tutorial - Velázquez master Copy (PART 2)

hey everyone Alex Javaris here welcome back to part two of this master copy demo filmed entirely in real time the painting I'm copying is one of my all-time favorite paintings a portrait of grandeur pariah by Diego Velazquez in part one are completed the blocking the all-important stage at the start of a painting when I simplify my subject into larger shapes or masses based on their light or dark tonal values I'm now ready to start on the refining stages here I'm mixing a cooler mid-tone by adding some ultramarine to my flesh color which was made with transparent oxide red and white which I'm placing along the edge of the shadow where the corner of the eye meets the bridge of the nose you here I'm using a softer head filbert brush to add some of this mid-tone to the edge of the eyebrow to create the soft transition as the eyebrow fades into the area above the bridge of the nose so what I'm essentially doing during these refining stages is that once I've established the larger value shapes I'm starting to think about the smaller shapes and subtle value transitions in between them in part one I use this analogy of a sculptor with a block of marble carving away planes in order to sculpt or model an object's form they'll start by carving away big planes like the front and the sides before chipping away smaller and smaller planes to further shape or refine their sculpture the large Valley masses are established during the blocking represent the big plains of my subject and each time I add a mid-tone in between two of my larger shapes it's the equivalent of me carving away a small plane this is why when painters use light and dark tonal values to express an object's form they call it modeling something you've got to be really careful not to do is to start modeling too soon because of our tendency to focus on details it's really easy to get caught up in all the smaller shapes and to start refining their edges before you've established the larger shapes remember the smaller shapes our value transitions in between the larger shapes so it's really important that your blocking is accurate before you do any refining once you have all the main values established it's much easier to see how the subtle value shifts fit in between them so here you can see I've started off these refining stages by modeling the area around the bridge of the nose and in between the eyebrows basically right in the middle of the face the reason for this is because in this next part of the demo I'm going to be working on the eyes and nose the eyes and nose are the essential features in a portrait because they will give you the likeness of your sitter and once you have them placed accurately you can use them to measure the mouth and the outer contours of the face here are mixing some more of my shadow color using ivory black Vermillion and Naples yellow you now the bridge of the nose is a really useful landmark for helping you place the eyes and nose what I normally do is work from the highlight on the bridge of the nose down to the small highlights in the corners of the eyes do you see how these three highlights form a small triangle shape I find that once I've spotted small geometric shapes like this they're really easy to measure and draw then once I've placed the corners of the eyes our work outwards horizontally towards the rest of the eye and downwards towards the bottom of the nose you I've had a few comments in some of my other videos asking me why I go into the features so soon traditionally painters who worked on a prima in oils like John Singer Sargent would have finished modeling the whole head before adding details like the eyes and I also still work that way when I have more time but because this demo is being filmed in real time I wanted to complete it within a single session and I find going into the features straight after the blocking to be a much faster way of working I learned this approach from watching demos by American realist painters like Richard Schmidt and Jeremy lipkin you here I'm placing the highlight in the corner of the eye with some of my highlight color now I want you to notice that even though I said I was trying to get this finished quickly how I'm not rushing I'm working carefully and deliberately checking and rechecking my shapes it's really important that I get the distance from the highlight on the bridge of the nose to the corner of the eye just right and I think it's a little too wide so here I'm scraping off the corner of the eye with my palette knife now I just said I needed to finish this painting quite quickly but judging by how long it's taken me to get part two of this demo out you wouldn't think so at the end of part 1 I'd said I was hoping to have part two out the following week but it ended up taking me much longer than I expected these longer demos have been taking the ages to produce along with my mastering course on my patreon channel all I've been doing recently has been making videos and I've not done any of my own painting in mumps the reason they take me so long is the amount of time I need to write the commentary unfortunately I'm not one of these artists who can articulately express themselves and explain what they're doing clearly as they do it when I listen back to myself I often find I'm unable to understand what I'm saying and if I can't understand what I'm saying how can I expect anyone else to so I always have to put a lot of thought into what I'm trying to say and I often end up redoing the audio a couple of times but in the feedback I receive quite a few people have said they find my explanations easy to understand so it appears the effort i've been putting into them isn't wasted the thing is talking about painting is notoriously difficult you're trying to describe something that's purely visual and when you try to translate what you're doing into words it's very easy for the meaning to become confused particularly if the person you're talking to hasn't done much painting before Harold speed uses a great analogy he says it's like trying to describe the taste of sugar to someone who's never eaten it I remember back when I started painting I used to read books and watch videos and I didn't have a clue what they were on about I don't know maybe I'm a bit thick but it was only after about five years of painting that I finally understood what terms like modeling actually meant the thing I used to find with a lot of the demos I watched is that while the artists in them were great at showing you what they were doing like I'm using this kind of brush and I'm placing a mixture of these colors here which is still very useful they nonetheless didn't spend much time explaining the principles behind what they were doing for instance they would talk about warmer and cooler colors in a way that assumes everyone watching already understands color temperature for me it's these underlying principles things like proportion light and dark tonal values and color temperature or to put it more simply shapes light and color which is the really important stuff that people need to know and it's what I try to emphasize in all of my videos so hopefully even though they take a long time to make the time I put into trying to explain stuff means that you understand some of these principles a bit better right here I'm reestablishing the highlight in the corner of the left eye you from the corner of the eye I'm then going to work across towards the iris if you look closely at the reference image do you see have edge of the shadow next to the corner of the eye and the inner edge of the iris form two parallel lines this is a really useful little shape that you'll often see whenever you're painting someone's portrait in either one eye or the other which you can lock into in order to place the eye you here before I place the iris I'm using the back of my brush to scratch out the white of the eye and here I'm just placing a small dark accent for the tear duct you once again I'm double-checking the distance from the corner of the eye to the edge of the iris making it a little wider then when I'm happy this distance is right I'm painting in the iris with the same dark color I use for the hair a mixture of transparent oxide red and ultramarine now that I've added the dark to the iris I want you to notice his edge do you see how in the original painting it draws your attention in fact it's the main center of interest that's because it's one of the only hard edges in this whole painting Velasquez his work is recognized for the wonderful way he painted edges he was one of the first artists to realize that when we look at our subject as a whole without letting our eyes wander from one point to another focusing on individual objects the shapes in front of us will not have continuous hard outlines instead there will be quite a lot of variety along the outlines of different shapes and in most places the edges in between shapes will appear fused together when we observe everything separately focusing on one small area at a time the way we normally look at things in our everyday lives we will see hard edges everywhere and if we paint everything in focus our scene as a whole will not appear the way we really see it in nature our image will appear more graphical like an illustration in part one I spoke about how Velasquez along with other artists during the Baroque period developed a new optical way of working painting what they saw instead of what they knew well because of this new way of working Velasquez discovered that by selecting one main focal point and varying his edges accenting one or two hard edges and softening the others he could create much more lifelike paintings so this idea of selecting a focal point and varying the quality of the edges between different shapes is really important if you want your work to appear realistic when working from life you identify different edges by squinting when you squint at your subject you will unify the values blurring the edges in between them then as you gradually open your eyes one or two edges will jump out before the others these will be your hardest edges as a general rule these will be found in the areas where the contrast between light and dark is greatest under joining shapes which are closer in value to each other will have softer edges but today we don't need to worry about selecting which are the hard and soft edges because Velazquez has done the work for us giving us an absolute master class in painting edges in the process now as for all the ways there are to actually paint different kinds of edges there are many and how you choose to approach them whether it's more refined and finished or with looser brushwork will affect the overall appearance or style of your work right here I'm mixing a much cooler mid-tone color by adding more ultramarine and some alizarin crimson to my existing mid-tone you which I'm placing along the edge of the eyebrow as it fades into the area above the bridge of the nose you the thing to remember when you're painting edges is that the quality of different kinds of edges is created by changes in value when you see a soft edge it's a gradual transition from one value to another if you want your work to look painterly you need to add these intervening values by painting them in rather than just blending with your brush just like earlier when I was talking about modeling think of soft edges as small planes where the surface of your subject is changing direction and paint each of these planes with careful deliberate brush strokes also when you paint me softer edges as well as looking for gradations in value look for variations in color it's often within these gradual value transitions that you'll find some of the most interesting colors anyway if you want to find out more about edges I'll put a link to the video I made on how to paint edges in the description below [Music] [Music] [Music] I'm now placing the iris in the right eye using some of my dark made with transparent oxide red and ultramarine the brush I'm using is the quarter inch long flat Eclipse coma by Rosa Minko so here using my same dark color I'm going to start placing the dark eyelashes and here I'm indicating the outer edge of the right eye notice how all the edges around the right eye are quite soft so this will need more refining here I'm using some of my warm dark shadow color to indicate the white of the eye on the inner edge of the right iris notice how the white of the eye is barely discernible so it only needs the slightest hint you here I'm scratching out the small highlight in the right eye I normally scratch highlights out before painting them in because it's much easier to correct if I make a mistake but I think the highlights in the eyes look pretty good as they are so I shall probably leave them like this you here I'm scratching out the small highlight on the bottom eyelid it's worth noting that scratching things out like this will not work so well if you're using a more absorbent surface like the ready-made cotton canvases you find in most art stores but the oil Prime linen I'm using let's the paint move more so when I scrape back or scratch away I'll be able to remove more of the paint here I'm placing a call mid-tone underneath the bottom eyelid you and here I'm reestablishing the highlight on the bottom eyelid now do you see have these three highlights to highlight on the bottom lid the highlight in the eye and the highlight on the upper eyelid all line up vertically with each other this happens because the light source is being reflected by the eyeball along the same vertical axis and it's something you'll often see so whenever you paint someone's portrait check to see how the highlights in the eyes line up with each other you also do you see how the highlight in the right eye lines up horizontally with the highlight in the left eye when you start painting the features it's really important that you keep checking their alignment remember my centrelines from part one where I placed a vertical centerline down from the bridge of the nose and a horizontal centerline for the eyes well any feature which appears on both sides of the face like the highlights in the eyes will be parallel with my horizontal centerline now Wanda pariah is holding his head very straight so his horizontal centerline is completely flat but if like most people his head had a slight tilt then this horizontal centerline would have an angle which I would have recorded when I placed the centre lines at the start then when it came time to place any of the features or small details like the corners of the eyes or highlights on the eyelids I would check and make sure they share the same angle as my original center lines here I'm checking the highlight on the bottom eyelid of the right eye lines up with the eye opposite you right here I'm scratching back into the edge of the right iris in order to soften it slightly I've already said how the iris of the left eye has one of the only hard edges in this whole portrait well it's important to note that the irises other edges are not as hard the other side of the left iris is completely lost and the edges of the right eye are also much softer this is something you will often see when you're painting someone's portrait the irises will have one edge that is harder than the others so you must soften the other edges accordingly if you leave all their edges hard the irises will look cut out you the same is true for the whites of the eyes a mistake you will often see beginners make is to paint the whites of the eyes to light and all the same when in fact the whites of the eyes are much darker than we think they're usually the same value as the surrounding flesh but with one section the section that's closest to the light source much lighter than the others here I'm mixing a cool gray color made with ivory black and titanium white for the inside white of the left eye this is the same value as my flesh color but much cooler in temperature and it's the contrasting value between the white of the eye and the dark iris that makes the edge of the iris appear hard here I'm adding a warm transition to the back of the right eye to soften its edge where the eyelashes are and here I'm using a soft head round brush called a rigger and some of my cool mid tone to paint in the highlight on the bottom right eyelid now watch this do you see how I'm recreating this small highlight by painting underneath it with a darker color carving it out this is a really good way of painting the bottom eyelids painting the bottom edge of the eyelid with a lighter color then carving it out underneath with a dark I keep referring to the bottom right eyelid as a highlight but now that I've painted it in you can see that it isn't is actually a mid-tone this is something you've really got to watch out for when you start adding these small highlights it's very easy to make them too big and too bright we make this mistake because we're only comparing them with the values right next to them without considering where they fit into the overall value scheme if we see a small shape surrounded by dark it will look brighter and larger than it actually is but if we compare it to the larger masses the lights and the shadows will see that it fits somewhere in between them here I'm adding a warm dark accent to the left tear duct and the underside of the upper eyelid so here I'm scratching out the small highlight in the white of the left eye you so it's really important when you start adding the small shapes and details that you judge their values correctly and that they fit into the overall value scheme this is another reason why it's essential to get the blocking right at the start before you start adding details if you have all your main values established when you start mixing colors for the smaller shapes and details you can compare them to the larger masses and see how they fit another thing you've got to avoid once you start adding details is not to add too many of them as I've said many times before we all have a natural tendency to want to focus on detail and the more we look for detail the more we will see but just like with hard edges areas of detail will draw the viewers attention if we paint everything in detail by everything in focus our painting will not appear realistic for a scene to appear to us the way it does in nature we need to select our main points of focus so just like we did with the hardest edges we also need to choose which details we include carefully with this master copy Velasquez has chosen the details for us but when you're working from life to help you choose which details to include once again you need to squint same as we did for the edges squint down at your subject and start with the most prominent details the first small shapes which pop out then as you add the details they act as anchor points in the viewers mind bringing together the large masses underneath without the details the viewer will often not know what they're looking at and it's only after the details have been added that the large mass is underneath makes sense for me this illusion is the real magic of this optical approach to painting and why I love it so much how you can bring flat shapes of color to life just by adding a few details and I'm often amazed at how little information is needed to produce something really lifelike what normally happens when I paint is I'll start off by adding too many details then I'll end up removing most of them it sounds like a bit of a cliche but the more experienced I get the more I realize painting is a matter of learning what to leave out you here I'm mixing a new mid-tone color a violet made with transparent oxide red ultramarine alizarin crimson and titanium white you which I'm placing along the edge of the shadow on the forehead here I'm placing a warmer color in between this mid-tone and the shadow so I've essentially created two small planes which turn the forehead from the front to the side here I'm adding a slightly darker note to the shadow just behind the left eyebrow this is some really subtle modeling which adds just a little variety to the shadow on the side of the face but as you add variety to any of the larger masses be really careful not to overdo it make sure you keep it subtle if you exaggerate the subtle changes in value within your large masses you'll risk losing their 3d appearance so here I'm mixing a warmer version of my flesh color by adding some alizarin crimson to it most of the time the variations you see within the large masses are actually changes in value but rather changes in color here I'm adding my warmer flesh color to the middle section of the face warming up the area around the nose and across the cheeks you here I'm adding a transition in between the side plane of the nose and the front of the cheek to create the soft edge at the side of the nose fades into the cheek as I work on the more subtle modeling I'm trying hard not to over affine I want my work to have a paint appearance and if I add too many of these smaller shapes I'll end up covering up my larger more visible brushstrokes the way to avoid over a fining is to keep standing back from a distance your work will appear more refined and shapes will blend together optically from up-close everything will look rough and you'll be tempted to keep fiddling around the problem I'm having is that I'm working from my computer screen sat down in front of my desk at home so I'm unable to stand back as often as I would like but I'm still taking breaks every now and again to view my work from a distance try to keep your brushwork broad and simple ideally you should be aiming to work with as few brush strokes as possible which is much easier said than done and you should try and use the largest brush you can get away with or at least slightly larger than you feel comfortable with I'm now starting to work on the nose here I'm using some of my warm flesh color to carve out the edge of the shadow on the tip of the nose which I see is quite defined I'm using some of my warm mid-tone to soften the edge of the shadow at the back of the nostril you and here I'm using Vermillion to mix a really warm mid-tone color which I'm going to use for the edge of the shadow on the nose now I think I've made the edge of this shadow too soft which makes his nose look rounder than it is so I'm going to have another go at it I often find I need more than one attempt at painting an edge before I get the exact quality I'm after [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so there we go his nose now looks a little straighter you here I'm placing some of my warm mid-tone along the edge of the shadow on the left cheek here I'm mixing more of my warm dark shadow color made with ivory black and vermilion you which I'm using for the shadows under the nose up until now this part of the portrait has been unified as a single dark mass but I'm now ready to start working into this area in more detail starting with the most prominent shape that I see here I'm using the back of my brush to scratch out the small shape made where the light catches the front of the nostril this is a classic example of a small light shape surrounded by dark that I could easily make too large or too bright so I want to make sure I place it correctly with the back of my brush before I add any paint here I'm jumping back to the area under the right eye it can often be helpful if you get caught up in a particular area and find yourself struggling with it instead of just plugging away at it to move to another part of the portrait and come back to it later you right here I'm just readjusting the small light shape on the front of the nostril by painting some of my shadow color back into it you and now I'm painting in the small light shape on the front of the nostril and notice how dark I've made it I haven't used my flesh color but rather my warm mid-tone here I'm just rechecking the drawing I've noticed how the back of this small light shape lines up directly underneath the corner of the eye and here I'm rechecking the distance between the small light shape and the edge of the shadow at the back of the nostril I never stopped thinking about drawing I measure and check each and every brush stroke that I make here I'm painting some of my dark shadow color back into the warm mid-tone on the left cheek this is a technique for creating soft edges if you've worked with walls before you'll have probably discovered that when you place a darker color on top of a lighter one it mixes with the color underneath by painting the shadow into the midtone I'm intentionally mixing on the canvas and do you see how this gives me a blurry edge you the edge of the shadow on the left cheek is one of the softest edges in this whole portrait father it's one of the most gradual value transitions from dark to light this is because there are several large plane changes as the round cheek turns from the side to the front of the face you here I'm reapplying the small light area above the left nostril with some of my mid-tone you and here I'm using my mid-tone to paint the edge of his moustache just below his left nostril here I'm mixing more of my warm flesh color made with titanium white transparent oxide red ultramarine blue and alizarin crimson you which I'm using to add a few warmer notes to the lights in the cheeks in the forehead the brush I'm using here is a medium-sized filbert brush one of those flat brushes with rounded ends the round ends mean they hold more paint in the middle of the brush so the brushstrokes they leave fade towards their edges which makes them very good for painting soft edges and you'll have noticed I've been using filbert's throughout these modeling stages [Music] [Music] here I'm mixing more of my highlight color which I'm using to add a really bright note to the corner of the eye and here I'm adding a slightly brighter note to the left cheek I'm now working on the really soft transition created by the edge of the moustache as the hair fades into the area under the nose I'm using a soft head filbert brush to gently apply some of my mid-tone along its edge here's another slightly lighter note on the left cheek which accents the edge of the skin fold under the left eye [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] finally I've added the small shadow shape under the right nostril with that the essential features the eyes and nose are complete and I'm starting to get a likeness of Wanda Pereira I'm now ready to move on to the rest of the portrait starting with the mouth and the outer contours of the face there's about an hour and a half of this painting left to go and I'm hoping it won't take too long before part three of this demo is ready to watch in the meantime I really hope you enjoyed part two and got to see how the large masses I established during the blocking in part one come alive once you start adding the smaller shapes and details if any of you want to have a go at this there's a link in the description to the reference image feel free to tag me on Instagram so I can see how you got on and if you want to learn more about edges part three of my math drawing course is now available to watch on my patreon channel anyway that's all for now take good care of yourselves and best of luck with your painting thank you for watching

Channel: SIMPLIFY Drawing and Painting

Views: 46,944

Keywords: Velasquez, Velázquez, Juan de Pareja, Portrait Painting, Portrait, Oil Painting, Painting tutorial, Alex Tzavaras, mass drawing, Drawing, diego velázquez, oil painting tutorial, master copy, diego velazquez, how to paint like velazquez, portrait painting tutorial, classical oil painting, mixing flesh tones, art tutorial, alla prima, baroque art, old master painting, how to paint like the old masters, metropolitan museum of art, painting techniques

Id: MgYIDQyvAWU

Length: 62min 5sec (3725 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 17 2020