Unlocking The Secret To 'Sargent's Effect' || Mastering Unconventional Edges

everybody's heard of this Sergeant effect painter John Singer sergeant of paint Loosely applied at from both his danike movements stroke uh there's nothing there it's ugly habit of over blending everything John Singer Sergeant Sergeant or Sergeant Sergeant Sergeant is Sergeant Sergeant but no one actually explains how he pulls it off in in turn this lack of knowledge leads to work that only mimics his style but lacks his understanding and can never really show his masterful touch today I will be revealing the fundamentals behind his technique and you can become a better artist in no [Music] time there's a magic trick by artist like Velasquez zor Sergeant where you're sitting in a museum and you're a few Paces away and the painting looks perfect it looks hyper realistic and then you go in a little bit closer and it just falls apart right from the hip and you can see all the brush strokes and it frankly doesn't even look like the subn matter that it's trying to replicate then you back up again and you get the same visual expression from before it looks like the thing that it's trying to represent now this was a big shift from the more hyperrealistic art that preceded it and of course the extremely loose abstract art that followed it but in today's video I'm going to be explaining how that specifically works because I see out in the internet and in live Gallery shows and all of them that people try to mimic the style of being loose but unfortunately they actually don't understand how Sergeant did it the main thing that differentiates copycats and Sergeant is his edge control now this is something extremely important and it needs to be hyper overstated because people mess this up all the time be saying to yourself oh I know what an edges I know exactly what it is it's just you know there's hard edges there's soft edges blah blah blah there's firm edges I know what they are well the problem is people really might know what they are but it doesn't come out through their work so let me explain how Sergeant uses his edges cuz clearly he does know what he's doing if we go into these images that are scanned and you can zoom in close to them you'll see that ser does not have everything loose right he only makes certain objects certain Strokes that he needs to make loose and then he'll actually make almost a majority of stuff decently Blended so to say now blending is a bad word because people think that you need to blend everything you don't need to blend everything but blending essentially is softening The Edge between something and when you soften an edge it mixes the value of the two shapes that are being softened essentially so I'll show you a demonstration of that and when you're doing that what you're doing really is not only changing the value but you're also changing this Edge and what that does when you make especially a blended Edge it does a few things one it pushes it into the distance because things that are farther away from us tend to lose resolution so as soon as you start blending a lot of stuff it'll feel like it's receding from you and it will feel like it's not in Focus right you can see that I did this trick for example on this cat painting where even though it's subtle your mind will pick up on it the background is pretty soft and it feels like it's in the distance whereas the foreground is kind of a little bit sharper and it's just by a little bit it's not by a lot cuz if you really overd this effect it'll look too photographic but it gives off this feeling of depth and you're always trying to go for depth in your artwork but the way that Sergeant did it as well is that he wouldn't just soften an edge to create a sense of depth or Focus although he did do that that quite a bit and I'll show an example of that like in this painting but when he was softening edges the main reason why he did it was because the form was round and there's a few other caveat there if it's a human form you want to render it out just a bit more just be a little bit more careful with it and make sure that you have your edges correct so if you look in a reference of a human face you can see that there's hard edges some places usually where there's cast shadow because a cast Shadow will create a hard Edge and then there's also soft edges where the light is actually rolling over the round form of the nose for example or the lips or the the forehead or whatever anything with a sense of roundness is going to be soft now now you can see that there's a ton of variety here right you have soft edges you have hard edges all this all the types of edges right and if you just blend everything or you don't blend everything and this is the main point I'm trying to make and you don't blend everything and everything is just completely sharp it's going to feel really really harsh and if anybody's ever described your painting that way it feels harsh feels like overdone or it just kind of makes you crawl up or for example and I'm going to show you a a really good test to test if you're artwork is way too hard or if it's way too soft this is this is a really good one so if you have an iPhone it doesn't really work with Android although I'll give you a I'll give you a secondary example you can use to test JW with Android you want to take a photo of your painting and then you want to pull it up in your photos app and then you want to adjust the live now I'll show you an example down the screen you're basically just taking the key frame and then you're moving it and what that does is that it actually softens all the edges now this is if you don't have any editing software by the way which is what we'll get to for the Android version but you'll see that when I move this key frame away from live blurs it a little bit and it gives l less texture now you might be wondering well what's significant about that right well when you give something less texture essentially what you're doing is you're softening everything it's actually similar to if you take a painting and then you grab a pallet knife and you scrape everything off right when you scrape it it's going to obviously blend because you're moving the paint and what that does is that it just softens all the edges ever so slightly right and it might even be almost imperceptible to you but it does make a difference makes a huge difference and this is one of the things that separates kind of intermediate artists from more advanced artists is this edge control right and obviously sergeant had this in Spades so if you take your painting and then you go from live to the other one and then it looks a thousand times better and it doesn't look harsh at all then you'll know that you over you didn't blend almost enough right now there's a really important caveat here as well as far as blending cuz I'm not advocating for blending as in you take your finger and you just smudge it out I think that's one of the worst forms of blending right uh but there's a different way to get a soft Edge which still looks Brushy which is what Sergeant would do a lot and from what I can tell he would use different brushes depending on the edge condition of whatever he was trying to paint so for example if there was a background there was a large passage that you need to make you know almost black he would use more of a sable brush or a Hogs hair brush or one of those brushes where it's not all intact it wouldn't be really synthetic looking although you can use synthetic you have to use it in a very specific way in this circumstance but he would take one of those regular brushes that didn't wasn't very linear it wasn't very held together and perfect it had a lot of imperfections and then you take it and you don't actually put it down on the canvas very carefully and make like a stroke like you're just making a simple stroke what you do is that you move it side to side you brush it around you never want to push in your brush that will destroy it but the actual technique of applying the paint really changes the way that it ends up looking even though this Edge thing is very subtle it makes a huge difference so you'll take it and then you'll move it around right left to right a little bit around and what it will create is this abstract pattern that is very soft on the edges versus if you grab synthetic brush and you place down a giant plop and then it looks just super linear and not as good so what Sergeant would do is that in the backgrounds he would use this technique right and then in maybe the passage of a skin he would still use this technique because skin is very soft and you can you can zoom into his stuff if you don't believe me not everything is sharp he's very specific about what he actually keeps Brushy and when he keeps a little bit more or less refined right and when you're you don't have to blend it with your finger again you can actually create a blended look by just scraping dry brushing or applying it with this this kind of manner that I'm talking about so once you've done that it'll have a better abstract quality to it and it'll had a have a better Ed edge control now here's the third caveat that I really want to talk about which really pulls people back and and eliminates them from looking like Sergeant and just like a mimic I remember when Jeff watt said that there was good loose and there was bad loose and it's definitely true the bad loose is when somebody has really poor eyesight now you might not think that this affects your painting because you can get up close in but especially if you're working from a photographic reference is where it gets really bad although a little bit as well with your with your sitter cuz you can never really make it as sharp as you needed to but what happens is that when you're working on your painting and then you back up distance between the actual painting and your eye that distance changes the edges of the painting and this is the main reason why Sergeant effect works because it's hyper sharp so all the edges are actually more sharp than they would be if you looked at it at the same scale so if you really zoomed in on maybe the hand or something like that and then you really zoomed in on the hand of the painting and you looked at him comparatively the edges on the hand would be a lot softer but once you walk back all the edges soften to the point where it's actually more accurate to what it looks like in real life now this is so important because if you have really bad eyesight and you back up everything's going to look way more Blended so to say all the edges are going to be much softer and it's going to look better to you versus people with 2020 eyesight they actually have an advantage here because when they back up they see it in Crystal Clear Vision and this is one of those things where if you have good eyesight you can see that it's over Blended and fix that but if it's over Blended and you have bad eyesight you're not really going to be able to pick up on that right so you need to keep that in mind as well but when you're working back up get a pair of glasses if you can get some contacts whatever or take a picture of your your painting and then edit obviously the colors cuz it always gets the colors wrong doesn't matter how good your your camera is you have to adjust the colors to be correct and then you'll back up and then you can actually see what the the actual painting looks like to somebody with almost perfect vision right so this is extremely important and if you have bad eyesight you're going to make everything overly harsh and that's actually a stage of paintings that I went through where I made all these paintings that were extremely harsh and all the edges looked pretty bad when I was taking photos of it and I thought it was almost the fault of my camera but I made a little rule for myself which is uh besides extremely rare circumstances if you're if you're having a lot of trouble taking a photograph and you have like decent lighting the problem is not with your camera it's with your painting your painting has the problem now the now I want to just really push home this point as well that Sergeant did not keep everything loose some things were not loose at all so if you look at lady agnu the face is not really that loose you know he gets you know he can put something up in the eyebrow or something maybe one stroke in the eyebrow he does that quite a bit but besides that you really need to render it out quite a bit and you can get a little bit more loose in the clothing folds for example but it still needs to be the correct Edge at the end of the day and you can put in a stroke and then you can loosen up the edge a little bit which will make it more accurate but this this edge control is extremely extremely important especially when you're dealing with things that we have a very deep biologically ingrained understanding of what it should look like like faces and hands and if you don't render out your faces and hands and you keep it too loose it just will look wrong and it doesn't look it looks bad frankly because there's good loose and there's bad loose and if you don't know what you're doing with your edges or how this whole Edge effect happens when you back up then you're going to make everything way too way too harsh or way too Blended for example and you want to avoid these at all costs just a general guideline because when you raise up raise up the sharpness a little bit and it looks better then you want to know that you're over blending almost everything right even though that there should be a variety it shouldn't be a whole linear everything needs to be higher or lower in softness and on the Flip Flip Side as well use that texture technique and if everything looks much better you know that you're just being way too harsh your your painting is way too harsh you need to soften a lot of your edges I hope this video was inspiring because really important to understand that these Masters are not just Gods they're not they're not just products of their time period it's a product of human nature and it's a product of human will and if you're really willing to give all that it takes to become one of these guys it doesn't take a lifetime you don't have to sacrifice your family you know your kids or whatever it's just going to take a lot of time a lot of effort a lot of blood and a lot of sweat but these people were human beings and you can actually get to their level today because human beings fundamentally are still the same it's still possible for you and if you understand all of these Concepts if you understand and research their processes and their understandings then you too can become at the level of a sergeant or a Zorn or any of these guys so I really hope you guys have a great day hope you learn something go make something beautiful

Channel: Chad Jacobs

Views: 26,788

Keywords: sargent, Education, Sargent, oilpainting, oil painting flowers, educational videos, educational videos for adults

Id: ECrUDxVVvjA

Length: 14min 19sec (859 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 26 2023