Quick Tip 92 - Color Like Sargent

post impressionist John Singer Sergeant is known for his wonderful use of color I found a method I think he might have used to do [Music] that you'll need a few things to get uh get ready to do this little procedure so one thing is to chose a photograph of one of Sergeant's pieces to study um you could choose those online and print them or you might find a magazine that has a a good color reproduction so there's the first thing just to get you started the second thing is to get a pretty stiff sheet of paper um like this and cut a little square out about an inch square and then on the back cover it with Post-it glue these little stick glues that you can get call resuable restickable glue or potic glue just a little bit back here um so there's the second thing that will help and then another thing that will help if you're working in oil or acrylic um cut out some little pieces of canvas little square or little doesn't have to be square but little pieces of canvas that you can use um for I'll show you in a moment I call them little test strips and um and then you'll be ready now to set the pette up for doing a study well you know if you're doing a color study from any artist you you will um you will learn a lot more about it if you'll start with just three Prim the three primary colors are are no more than maybe four of the primary colors having a a warm blue and a cool blue um and so do that and I have here a palette setup I've got lizin Crimson right here I went ahead and gradiated uh lizin Crimson into a Val color line with h of yellow light which is a yellow that's very very close to um um our Spectrum yellow and that gives us red and yellow and then I have ultramarine blue here which I've gradated here with uh with the titanium white so that gives me gets me started uh for the study gives me a limitation on color so that I don't have to start figuring out from thousands of tubes and that sort of thing so that's what you do to get set up now um of course let me add to that if you're working with watercolor you just use your watercolor supplies in the same way all right so now I'm looking at Sergeant's this is Sergeant's uh reproduction of Sergeant's um Sergeant's painting called the oyster gatherers has a another longer French name but we'll call it oyster gathers for right now now there lot of fun things happening here that are typical of Sergeant one is what he does with the white right here how he creates that uh Sparkle white even though the the whole scene might seem to be sort of subdued we see these little pieces of white sparkling here and here and here and a little bit here and here and how does he get that how does he make that happen well here's the way to find out isolate it first and so I would just put my little square right in that area and that isolates it just so I can see I can um I can zoom in on just that area without having to be confused by other areas in there so that helps me to isolate it now the next thing I do is to ask myself I'm looking just at that white and I ask myself what color am I seeing what Hue am I seeing in the shadow area and in white um asking yourself what color you see in the shadow area is more important there's your biggest key right there so if I'm looking in the shadow area there I'm seeing two colors I'm seeing Prime I'm seeing I'm seeing a a blue gray and I'm seeing kind of of an orange um kind of a little bit of a pinkish pinkish orange and so what I'll do then I'm seeing blue gray and what value is it um it's not the darkest dark I can tell by looking at this uh shirt the woman has on that's a dark dark so it's not darkest dark and it's not the lightest light so I can tell it's a middle value well I know it's in Shadow it's going to be middle value or darker so there's there's my next clue so what I'll do then start out with start out with blue if it's blue gray I'll start out with blue and middle value blue so that it can come on my palette here and I'll just pull a middle value of blue onto the palette and it could be I suggest working with ultra rine blue or cobalt blue on this one if you work with phthalo blue it's going to be blue green it's going to be very difficult to to make that work so it's better to work with a blue that's closer to the Spectrum blue so we'll start with that now then we ask ourselves what do we do to make blue gray we said blue gray we know that orange is a compliment of blue and I've put a little orange in it all turn gray so what I'll do then is I'll come back over here to my orange section the orange portion of U of my mixture here and I want a value of orange that is the same value as that blue that gets me started so let's let's let's try that now I'm going gradually pull that orange into the blue and watch is it turning gray and if it's turning oh it's turning kind of a greenish gray that tells me it has too much yellow in it which is one reason for choosing that but I can hold my yeah that's way too yellow that tells me it needs more red so it mean it means it needs a little bit more red orange so I'll pull that over right in here now now let's see how does that look and um so I'll hold my palet knife up and that still seems that still seems a bit green all right so what I mean when it says it needs a uh uh it looks a bit green then I add more red now you can think when you're doing color studies from serent or any other um Master artist you can use the color wheel or think in terms of what the color how the color wheel is arrange in order to answer questions so if you don't get a a blue gray that matches the blue gray you're looking at here on your first try if it turns green the question you ask is what will turn that green gray you look opposite green on the color wheel you'll find red and that's how you know how to do that so I'm going to just add a little bit more red in here now so um and I need it to be the same volume now this is a this is a little procedure for thinking uh when you're mixing colors uh mix colors that are in the same value area and you can come closer to getting the values looking for now that ah I'm getting very very close now just by adding a little bit more red to that mixture uh and so now how am I going to test it well I'll use my little tester here you could simply do it with the back of the pallet knife like that but to to be more accurate we want to be a little bit more scientific here what I will do is I'll pull some of that color on the tip of my brush and on the edge of a test strip just on the edge of a test strip I paint the color and I'll hold it up to here it's not quite blue enough see sometimes you can fool yourself so I'm going to pull a little bit more blue into it cuz I want to be sure I have the blue gray that Sergeant has well really this is a reproduction so it's it may lean one way or the other but it's the relationship we're looking for here so it it will be the right study so rather than don't I wouldn't paint it right on top of this area now I come to a fresh area on the on the test strip and I'll paint a corrected version where I added more blue you can see the difference right here now I hold that and there it is there is the blue gray that I see on that sleeve of Sergeant's uh Sergeant's um painting here now I'm also seeing within that shadow area there I'm also seeing not just blue gray but I'm seeing that little bit of that little bit of kind of um um pinkish pinkish almost pinkish orange now I'm going to go to a clean brush I'm going to hold this brush in this hand I'm going to go to a clean brush I've already got the red here and um I see it it's kind of a a pinkish uh pinkish orange so I'm just I've already got the red add a little added a little B more white to the red here and see it's the same value the same value as the blue so that's important now let's see here now that's too pink that's too pink and maybe a little dark so let's add just a little bit more of the light and put a little bit more of the orange in there I that that just might be it that just might be I want to be sure it's the same value so what I'll do here I'll just use the same test strip and I'll go over this Edge and let's see is that what I'm seeing and there's a hole that no that's too brilliant so that means I need to get it grayer it's a pink but it needs to be gray and also it is and I hold it up here it's too light so that means I need to get it darker so I'll move over into a darker section here add a little bit more dark and going pull a little bit more I'll put a little bit more of the blue in there to help to uh to cut down the intensity of that and let's see now now what do I have do I have it now so I've changed it and I'll come right beside my my original mixture and see that TS me that t tells me the change I've made when I put them right on the edge there side by side the different mixtures rather than painting one on top of the other that is not uh that's not going to inform you very well it's just going to uh kind of frustrate you so now if I hold this right here aha that's it that's it so that means between what I found here and I'll just put it right over here and let me just sort of shape that color kind of like uh he has it shaped there and uh I'll go to this brush with this color in it and kind of shape that right next to it kind of like Sergeant has shaped it there and uh I push it right up in there those two pushed up together like that and then the only thing that's missing there is the white that is I have there the color that sergeant had to the sergeant used the and I think he's probably a little bit more that pink kind of FL there we go there we go you see if we if you have if you get those two are complimented colors and if you have the pink and the blue uh intermingled sort of intermingled he did that that's how he got a lot of those colors that seem to just Sparkle us especially in the shadow areas so the thing we do there to get the white now is the same thing the light is just as important what we find in a lot of uh Sergeant's work is that real magic happens in the shadows and so in the shadowed areas that we want to uh to address so I'm going to do the same same kind of procedure now where I move into the light and ask myself what am I seeing you might see just white paint bet you not so I'm going to pull some white paint over here and I'm going to hold it up here and I'm seeing no that's got some light in it and I'm thinking a little bit of orange a tiny tiny little bit of maybe red orange just to tint that very slightly and so what I'll do then is go right over in here put just a little bit of that red orange right in here now I'm going to pull white into it until it just feels like it feels slightly tinted so the not not pink and not red but very slightly tinted I believe I have it right there and if I hold it right here uhuh there I think that's much closer to what I'm seeing there and so then I'll just take another in this case I'm going to just get another clean brush here so I'll I'll go into that and well before I do that let's do a little test strip let's let's do a little analysis here where I I hold it hold the test strip here and here and that tells me that that feels right so I will put that color in the brush and bring it over here like this and work it into my little study area here much like I see Sergeant has worked it into to to uh this shape right in here and what we see happening in that shape we see some of that color some of that white uh we see moving into the more grayer area the grayer area there and now we're beginning to see that's how sergeant got that that brilliant white the BR the brilliant feeling of a white material um and so begin to move a little bit of the the light where the light reflects reflects on the on the fos like right in here and here and we begin to see that same kind of thing happening which is really wonderful so we could move uh then we could move our little square to other places in Sergeant's paintings and go through the same process now I'm just going to uh we don't have the time in the quick tip for me to go through the whole thing but see here for example and we see him doing the same kind of thing where we have on the beach the the blue of the sky reflecting onto the beach and also that feeling of water on the beach and you see the same sort of blue orange blue orange relationship in the same value area so you just move your little do a thorough study of the way you worked with color you just move your little your little U Square around in different sections then study the colors that you see in there just as you saw me studying there and then do your own painting where you have used Sergeant's methods for creating wonderful color if you found this quick tip helpful why not explore our F length instructional videos at dm.com we''ve got numerous downloads and DVDs for you to select from and we also have some of our lessons on YouTube uh ready for you to watch and download if you like so give it a try and there's your quick [Music] [Music] tip

Channel: In the Studio Art Instruction

Views: 131,856

Keywords: John Singer Sargent, how to paint, how to draw, online painting lessons, online art classes, online art lessons, color theory, in the studio, with Dianne Mize, SauteeLive, fine art, palette, easel, brush, canvas, art, oil painting, acrylic painting, watercolor, notan, Dianne Mize

Id: 1s0RZHJgJz0

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 21 2016