(intro music playing)
In this
video lesson world renowned painter Steve Huston will be painting a female
figure from a Thomas Eakins painting. Steve will teach you how to use
the symmetry of the figure as an artistic tool and how to break down
the figure into a series of simplified forms, shapes, and planes
upon which a light source interacts. You will also learn
specifically how to use tones and value, breaking each down one
by one to ensure you fully understand each technique to apply to your own paintings.

Alright in this lesson today we're gonna look at
a Thomas Eakin's painting. It's William Rush and his
models - it's a whole series of paintings he did actually of William Rush, he was a
founder of the school that he went to, Philadelphia Art Academy and
and was a sculptor.
And Eakins took it upon himself to kinda rehabilitate him
his rep - well that's not true, his reputation
was not needing rehabilitation, he was a rather forgotten
talent in Eakins eyes so
he wanted to bring him back
into the public discourse. And eventually he did a whole series
of these paintings and they became ever more personal and
ever less about Thomas Rush
the sculptor and more about just doing terrific artwork.
And so this is Thomas
Rush and this model. There's various names to it but the
series is called that and this is one of the series.
What we're gonna do today is we're gonna look at the symmetry and the asymmetry
of the human form and how artists use it
to pick - to get control over it. And by symmetry I mean
bilateral symmetry. The two sides being the same.
Now they're not exactly the same, but they're more or less the same.
You're gonna have an ear over here, an ear over there. Nostril, nostril, eye, eye,
cheekbones that we're gonna more or less track although
there's variations there but we're calling that the symmetry. And
all the way down through the head, neck, and torso there's
a bilateral symmetry. Once you get to the limbs, the hands, the arms,
the legs, the feet, there's no longer that symmetry there. What's
over here is not over there. What's over here is not over there.
This is a flexor group, this is an extensor group, they do different
things. The biceps on one side, the triceps on the other
side or back side of the arm. And so on the limbs we
have an asymmetry going on. In the head, neck, and torso
we have a symmetry. Now if we take that symmetrical torso -
and that's all we're gonna look at today - and we turned it
into a three quarter or a profile it would then be
an asymmetrical position. Now this is almost a perfect
back view. It's just slightly turned this way. And
so he has almost a perfectly asymmetrical
pose. And the legs are almost
perfectly, symmetrically posed and so we don't have
a bilateral symmetry on
one leg but between the two legs, what's going on here is not exactly
but very close to what's going on here.
One leg is fairly symmetrical to the other. Then we get up
to the arms and this arm is coming down
and going back into the canvas -
going back in.
Here it is in front. And then this arm
she's holding a lyre,
she's supposed to be a water nymph. There's a
posing for a fountain he did for
a city. This arm
is going back this way. So we have an asymmetry there.
In the shoulder girdle - I'm gonna lighten this
up so we can see it a little bit better. And you can see how
I can kinda dust my drawing back if it gets too dark or it
gets wrong of course I can rub it out or we can dust it back a little bit.
And correct it
or add to it, refine it.
(painting)
So this arm is, as I say, going back up this way.
And we're not concerned
with it's up here.
Alright so, symmetry,
asymmetry. And the, in the pose
and then the lighting
is coming from up here. Three quarter
on top, slightly in front. Typical
Brown School lighting. The three quarter lighting and the upper
placement of the light creates cast shadows that go down
and so the underside of the arm, the underside
of the buttocks are all gonna drop into shadow.
And the right side. Anything that's turning to the right
in this case. The right side of this
arm. The right side
of this erector muscle
moving along the spine. The right side
of the
ribcage. All are gonna turn all the way down of course and all the way up
are gonna turn into shadow. So we're gonna mark our
light source here, which is a recommendation
I would have for you when you're painting. Because if we don't
keep clear on where the light source is we'll tend to copy tones. We'll chase
the tones around. And we'll see a tone that gets a little darker, a little lighter,
especially if we're not working from a painting that's already translated
the problems for us. If we're working from life we see
tones everywhere. The more we look the more we see light, dark, light,
dark, our eye gets acclimated, the muscle that we use,
the thinking process we use gets stronger. The more we look the more we
see, the more we see the more we put in, the more we put in oftentimes
the more we confuse. So we need to put in just the key
elements. They're going to give us that
strength of composition, that chiaroscuro, that light and shadow
sculpting of the form. And so these kind of Brown School
paintings, and especially Eakins, is an American tonalist
really thought like sculptors. And that's the thing which
actually attracts me to them, or one of the things that attracts me to them,
that's the way I think is actually sculpting. I wanna actually
feel that form or fool myself into thinking
I feel that form actually coming out and going into the canvas
as I work. If you look at like a Rembrandt, he will actually sculpt the
paint so that it actually does that. You get a slight bah relief,
a slight building out of things that are closest to us like the forehead
or a nose. He'll actually build up the paint a little bit, not
consistently throughout the painting but often enough that you get
in key areas a sense of not only the values
structure turning, coming towards up, going away, but the actual
paint will get thinner in the background and thicker in the heavy highlights
to come towards us. There's a slight relief to it.
And that kind of thinking has always been very attractive to me.
Alright so, what we wanna do
then is map out all the shadow shapes
and give them a value. Now we're gonna simplify
Mr. Eakins painting here a little bit
for times sake but also for clarification so we
understand what he's doing
with his work here and what all of these structural
painters. Painters who are highly
dependent on drawing and highly dependent on
a strong light source to show well
crafted forms. Well crafted shapes
and strong, consistent
perspective positions.
Perspective of this is a slight turning towards a
three quarter. Not a perfect back view.
And the eye level is about
flat with us. Even though she's up on a model stand.
He's not done a lot to give us a feeling that we're underneath.
Just barely. And he didn't have to do much because we're standing up
looking at this scene of a model in an artist's studio.
And
just up a, you know, a foot or a foot and a half on the
model stand.
So here's the shoulder
blade in here.
(painting(
We'll establish that arm a little
more nicely.
And then we have a
background that is
in dark shadow too. The value of the shadow on the
body, on the model, and the value of the background
are the same.
(painting)
We're gonna do a little bit of that.
We're working on a toned canvas again in this lesson, as we have
in the last couple lessons. And that's exactly how
Thomas Eakins would work, he would tint - and you can see it very clearly
in his paintings. You can see the toned
canvas coming through over here in this area particularly
is just kinda scrubbed in and there's not much more than the tones canvas that he
started with. And then he actually draws more or less some of these
sculptural elements of the artist studio.
But of course he didn't work in black and white, he worked
in color in this and he's a Brown School painter and a very
committed one. There's not much color at all in an Eakins piece.
Even in his outdoors paintings. He adds green for the foliage and blue
for the sky but everything's got that brown,
burnt sienna in his case, inside of it.
Or underneath it I should say. Okay
and often times in these
kind of portrait situations or figurative, indoor situations,
this side of the background is lighter than
that side of the background because we have the light of the figure
going to be established here and we want to have
the contrast. So if this is very light we're gonna make that very dark. But over here
we have the shadow which is very dark. And so we're gonna make the background
not very light, that would steal the thunder of our
figure in light, but slightly lighter. And so
we get a nice separation but it won't be near as strong
as the separation here. And you'll see the momentarily.
(painting)
So we'll leave that like that. Let's go ahead and finish up the
hips a little bit.
Push this back down a little bit darker
and now we're gonna pick up our shadow
of our hips.
(painting)
And we have this lovely cascade of shadow
shape. This edging of the shadow down here.
(painting)
And the gluteal folds is where the buttocks
creases against the leg. The leg is a pillar of
support coming up and it has a mass, a form. Back here
the hamstring structure is equivalent to
this bicep of the
leg and it has a bit of a bulge to it
and that bulge comes up and presses
against the bulge of the gluteal,
the hips and the rear end, the hip
structure pinches over. And
we get what's called the gluteal fold. And so it's just an egg
that's being pressed against the slighter
and more slight egg of the leg muscle.
And pinches across. So we have that lovely
bracing shadow cutting across. And it helps to break up the
monotony here of all these vertical shadows
as does this arm going this way. This kind of
butchered at this point, we'll fix it a little bit later but we don't really care about it.
We'll do that. And this pulls in here
and then comes on down here.
(painting)
And I've given some basic lectures on the
leg. The leg's tricky because - the legs are tricky
because they're pillars of support. They have to feel like they have solid
strength to hold up columns of
powerful support that can hold up all the weight
of the figure. The weight of the masses above.
And yet they have to be fluid and organic
to show off that watery, graceful, lovely quality
of a young woman in this case.

Standing there and so stiffens
straight to balance out, fluid and graceful to give that
watery life design.
Alright
so there's our basic shadow shapes.
Now I see all sorts
of values in the half tones here, in the light side of the figure.
I'm gonna pick one value, only one value
because if I try and get all of the values
or two or three values I'll get confused and I'll confused my audience
too. And they will then
realize I don't know what the heck I'm doing because I'm putting those spotty tones
everywhere and nothing really is cohering. Nothing's
making strong sense. So what we wanna do is do our most
important separation, separating the light from shadow.
As soon as I separate all of the lights or at least the key lights
from the key shadows, now I have structure.
Now I have that chiaroscuro. I have form,
I have atmosphere, if the white of the canvas is gone
I've got solid structure, I can see more clearly
the truth or the needed corrections to my proportions.
This shape of light against this
shape of shadow.
And I can really begin then
to add secondary ideas. But if you start out
chasing all the little values, you're chasing the little
things. You're decorating. You haven't established
the big things. So if I do this,
that's most of the work. It might not be most of the time, probably isn't
most of the time that I spend on this. I probably spend quite a bit of time rendering
typically in a situation like this
so I'll maybe the first half hour I'm laying in
all of the lights and then shadow shapes
and the foreground and the background relationships and then I'll
spend maybe 20 hours, maybe 100 hours if I'm
in a tight style, really
delineating all the subtle nuances
and all the secondary details that I deem
appropriate to include. But all
that extra work is really unnecessary
in terms of what the audience needs. They just need to know the basic,
bare facts and everything else is
gravy. You want - by doing this you won't blow them
away with the illusion of the form, but you will clearly establish
the idea of the form. Which is exactly what you want
as an artist. We're really trying to give the audience
an idea about the world and it can be a poetic
idea, it can be a political idea. In this case it's really
just a structural idea.
But we need to make sure we're giving them the idea. And in our world
every time a form turns down
it gets darker. Every time a form turns
to the right, it gets darker. And those
establishing that consistency of fact
consistency of idea - is gonna give them
the confidence to buy into what we're doing. And
then they're gonna see it as relatively real or
at least as ringing true. We may not be realist
painters, or we may be very stylistic in our realism
so it may not be - may not look true
in terms of photographic truth, but it will ring true
in terms of the basic, poetic
truth or structural truth. Okay so right now
we've established the idea of that figure pretty well.
And we can -
there's all sorts of little corrections we can do and la, la, la, la, la
all that kinda stuff. But we've got the basics here. Alright now let's analyze
what we have. We've got a hip that
falls. And the reason the hips falling is
this leg has relaxed foreword a little bit. The knee is bent.
And so as that knee bends, it becomes a less
efficient support mechanism and that hip
is gonna fall with gravity a little bit. This leg
is a straight pillar of support. It's a locked out leg
and so it is holding up and so
pressing up our hip on this
side. And so we have an asymmetry.
Also as we said, that hip
is turned a little bit towards a three-quarter.
And so we have a slight asymmetry there. So notice that this
is taking the figure at attention back
view for her, front view for me. You can imagine my body straight down like the
bouncer at a bar, the guard at a gate. Straight and stiff.
And he's just thrown it slightly out of wack. He's turned it a little bit and tilted
a couple things a little bit. And so it gives it just a slight asymmetry
off that symmetry. The design itself
is celebrating the symmetry of the forms here.
And then carefully composing
the pose so that it's slightly out of wack.
We're slightly off center, we're overlooking slightly at a three
quarter, we're slightly below it. And
that figure is slightly articulating
in dynamic - subtly dynamic - ways.
Okay
so right on through here, a little
less than I had it.
(painting)
Alright, now we can track that
all the way through. You know, this
arm's up, this arm's down. So he's constantly playing that game and that's
the game that these classicists -
these classicly trained or classicly motivated -
they were drawn to the aesthetics of the
classic
ideals, meaning the Greco-Roman, Greek and Roman ideals.
And it's called - in Italy it's called
contrapposto. Opposing positions. Positions that are slightly
in different articulation against each other.
And so the top figure - the top form might be turning this way, the
bottom form's turning that way and the classic
design of that would be the
or classic idea - classics a bad use at this
moment - an easy idea is twisting rope.
There's a slight torquing
of things turning away from us, or the forms turning
dynamically against each other. He's doing the one and not the other. He's
turning it slightly away from us but he's not giving any
twisting - everything that's facing is facing the
same way with her. And so it's a
dynamic, traditional pose and yet it's a stiffer, formal
pose. We're not having that classic
curve as Rodin called it in the
Greek and Roman sculptures. The classic curve was a
twisting of the ribcage mainly against the
torso. That's usually where it started. The ribcage would torque one way,
the pelvis would torque the other way and we'd start to get that ringing out
of the wet towel or the rope action where it's twisting. He's
askewed that. He's stayed away from that. And he's gone to a much more subtler
statement. And you can apply all sorts of
thinking to why he might do that. We've got an artist in the studio
who's painting a model that's going to be a sculpture
and so the sculpture is formalized and a little
stiffer. It's not fully articulated and so the model that's
posing for that is stiffer. Or
it can be - well
or it could be a lot of things but let's leave it at that. Alright so
(painting)
here's our basic structure again. Now we've got
light and shadow and so if we look at this
we've got light
and shadow
and that creates a little boxy idea where the
light meets the shadow, that's a corner, it turns.
Now notice what we have -
if we look at the original again, you're gonna notice
now all the way down these corners
all around these bumps where it goes
from hip - from waist to hip,
from hip to leg, each one of those are corners.
So now we're gonna start to have lots and lots of corners
to look at. And the corners are gonna be very useful - let's get rid of this line
here - very useful for talking about
our symmetry, asymmetry. They're gonna help us
describe that and place that
in space, in picture space, picture plane space.
So now what I wanna do as an artist
is I wanna make sure that when I have this bumping down here
now notice this bump
(painting)
is different than this bump.
It's asymmetrical. That is doing something a little different
than that. That bumps out. This goes down. That
bumps in. This bumps out a little quicker and a little
shorter. This bumps out in a little slower
and a little longer. And so you can
go down your contour - let's go out here now and make our
background lighter so we can see it a little more clearly.
You can make
that contour all out of little
chiseled
facets. Just like a wood carver
would do in the beginning. This is a painting
about a wood carver. And the wood carver would
chisel it out that way.
If we come over here now - remember we have
a gluteal group of muscles over here, we have the same
grouping over here. We have a ribcage set here, the other
side of the ribcage is over here. What is here is
basically over there also.
(painting)
Now if we were painting an Ingres - an Ingres
painting. Ingres, Dominique Ingres
a neoclassicist we've looked at him before.
If we were painting an Ingres, he would play up
the watery, fluid, curved quality of this.
With Eakins it's more chiseled, more squared.
So we could
notice we could actually then start playing with the square side against the
round side - the postimpressionists, the group that came after the impressionists
played with that idea often times. Some of them did.
Pascin and a few others. Okay so
let's - so there's all sorts of levels of symmetry
asymmetry. Value and shape and line
(painting)
but we're just gonna stick with shape and
line here. Let me get this
set out for you a little bit clearer.
(painting)
Alright
now what I'm interested in
as a good drawing
painter - a painter that draws well, that pays attention to
the structure and the
positions of those structures - is I want
these to track. Right there.
Now, when I - at first glance
this side is just straight on down and going that way. And so
probably would be a good strategy not to
show that little divet or deal with that little divet in the
beginning. Let's take it out for a second.

Bear with me just momentarily. I'm gonna simplify this down
now. Like so.
Now notice by taking out that lump and bump - it didn't do
a lot of damage to the finish, we could leave that out of the final painting and
your audience wouldn't notice that at all. We lost
that beautiful fluid quality there that's a shame, but we got
a good architectural form that
rings true and that is emphasizing the
symmetry. Notice that the corner here
and the corner here
are tracking.
They're tracking nicely.
That corner is only correct if it's in the correct relationship
to this corner.
And if it's not, then you adjust it. You
make an adjustment and correct it. This is too high, you lower it, this is too low
you raise it, whatever it is. But we're gonna raise it as it. Now we're gonna come right
down here, here is our other corner,
right there.
There's a corner, the bottom of the mini skirt, if you think of the
hips
there's a miniskirt idea which is
not a bad way to begin a conception of them.
There's the mini skirt and then this would be the
gluteal folds in here. And then you can see how the legs
come out of that in kind of a diamond shape
from skinny waste to wide hips, from wide hips to skinny
knees. You can see that we have as similar
idea here, we've made this box here at the top, it's chiseled out at the top.
You can see my drawing
courses to develop those ideas further
but now we want to feel this
against this. And this isn't quite tracking correctly. This should come up.
Now when I look at the source material, the painting
of the model on the stand in this case for us, this is
a little ambiguous where that corner would be.
Just pick a spot. I'm gonna pick a spot a little
higher since that's been the
main theme in this, the hip is higher
on this side, higher corners, lower corners.
So I'm gonna bring that up a little higher. Even though it -
as I look at it it just rounds off. I can't really find a good
corner, it doesn't look like that to me, it just
looks like this to me. And so I'm gonna arbitrarily pick a corner
that's self serving. When I'm
making my choices, I'm making my choices much more
about what serves my purpose, which serves my
idea, not about what's simply real. If you go
at it as simply real, simply copying the form
you're not gonna see the nuances, you're gonna miss the truth of it
and you're gonna miss the opportunity to really exploit an idea. In this case a structural
idea. So I'm gonna - I cannot see it as a -
I look at it at first glance or maybe even
at third glance. So I'm gonna impose
a corner on it. And then this comes down
and goes in
and this comes down and doesn't go
in maybe. I can't see it going in.
Well you have
two choices there.
You can see where they bump here
and they bump here.
And
this bumps here and this doesn't. Well that little
bump is not a big deal, I've got the major bumps. So we can take
out a little facet on one side, leave it in on the other,
and no harm done. Or, again, you can impose
that strict
logic. That plan of attack
onto your model. And that
that's what all the great artists did is they forced reality
to conform to their idea of reality. A
composition is the artist demanding
that nature conform, that nature make sense.
When you go to a movie, read a book, listen to a song,
look at a painting, it is the artist
firmly, sometimes desperately, demanding
that the world conform to some logic. It might -
the logic might be total chaos, disillusion
or the logic for we realists is
usually harmony, beauty, those kind of
idyllic
ideas. Okay so can you see now how
we've used the symmetry of what's going on. If the hip bone thrusts
out, the hip bone thrusts out,
or even if it doesn't thrust out, there's a hip bone
here, there's a hip bone here. Or we don't know our
anatomy and there's a bump here, there's a bump here. We know at least that there has to be
symmetry. So we look for that symmetry. Sometimes we get skunked
and don't see the symmetry and we have to force it
in there, or we allow for the fact that it's not a very important
idea and we just give it a pass. Either idea is absolutely
fine. But now we've tracked this out structurally. We've
chiseled it out like a wood carver and then as a second step we come back
and we would round off. Okay so let's leave that
for now. That's a - kind of a schematic, chiseled,
boxy
concept - conception of what's going on
with our model, or in this case the painting. Now let's go back to the tones.
We have two values. We have a dark value - I'm gonna get rid of some of this
stuff so you can - we can focus clearly on
our figure. Let's
remove this so we're not distracted.
(painting)
And I think I'll leave that line for
now in there so we can keep that lesson
alive.
(painting)
Alright.
Alright let's look at the tones inside now.
We've got - dramatic pause, let me get a little more black paint here.
(painting)
Alright so we've got our light side and our shadow side.
(painting)
I'm just gonna lay that shadow down there and I'm not gonna talk about its shape for
now.
Some of you more astute
painters might be raising your eyebrow or yelling at me
warning me of something, we'll come back to it.
Alright, now we have the light value against the shadow side.
Light against shadow creates a corner.
All we're doing here is we're working with a simple idea of different value, different plane. If
I make the skin tone a different value in this shape and make it a
brand new, a second value in this shape, it will turn, it will be
box logic. Different value, different plane. If I make the
two planes, the two shapes the same value they will look flat.
Even if I give them different colors they'll look flat more than likely.
We want them to have different values. Value is your most powerful, your strongest
component, visual component, for turning form.
For creating the chiaroscuro, that sense of the
forms coming off the canvas, looking realistic,
illusionistic,
and so we desperately need that value change. And the more
dramatic the value change, usually the more dramatic things turn
up until we get to pure black and white. If we do that
it doesn't look real, it looks artificial. So we wanna back off that big.
Caravaggio, for example, backed off it very little, and it became
this hyper realistic, hyper stylized realism.
And so we can really push it, but typically we wanna make it a
middle light against a middle dark. And then we can always go darker
in the shadows later and lighter in the lights later. And we're gonna do that right now
actually. Alright so we now have
the light side against the shadow side. Now as I look at Mr. Eakins' piece
he's broken the light side down into two
values. They're subtle values. If I squint
they look like one value that just kinda gradates into the shadow but
when I look at them carefully, especially at the hips,
I'm going to see that this
side panel of the hips,
the side
plane,
and notice when I start
rendering within any particular silhouette
I don't - I let it kinda fade out. It just kinda poops out at the
bottom. And it poops out at the top. Because I haven't analyzed
how this plane structure or this value structure merges
and melds and develops new ideas up here. And
so I'm not gonna commit to it, I'm just gonna work
take a little section and then work across. And then go up or go
down, take a little section, work across, go up again, little section, work
across. And that's gonna be my strategy for getting my
rendered details in there. Alright so
now what we have is -
I'm gonna darken this plane slightly. Now what we have is
really two planes. I'm gonna keep that a little
stronger than he has it. You see that now? Two planes
in light. A side plane
and a back plane. And then the shadow
will drop down into a right facing
plane. And so if I do it in one form
that's what the lighting situation is doing
to one form it's gonna do it every form, give or take a
drop off. As the light source weakens that effect may
weaken and get lost and it fades into an ambient light or shadow
and then we loose those secondary structures.
But in - this is a strongly lit situation
all the way through. Most strongly here. But it's strongly lit
all the way through. And so we're gonna wanna make sure that we
show off that strategy all the way through.
So now I'm gonna do it again with this
hip. We did it with that hip now we're gonna do it with side of the hip.
(painting)
And that's facing
towards the left, getting a little bit darker.
(painting)
I'm just stroking in that little
value. And then I'm gonna go ahead and
(painting)
darken that over.
(painting)
I'm gonna thin out that shadow, that interior shadow there,
a little bit.
You can see how even though the hip is considered a ball
generally as a form, you can see how boxy I'm conceiving this
and working it out. Boxes are much easier to render
because a box has a corner - several corners -
but it has a corner where a tone will stop. Here
my dark tone stopped and my middle tone began.
Here my middle tone stopped and my light tone
began. And so we have these corners. Oftentimes
on - almost always on a
realistic figure they're soft corners, but they're still corners,
and those corners are very useful to us, they show structure
nicely and they're easy - they have a definite
limit. They stop at some point clearly
or more clearly since it's not perfect, boxy forms
then the rounded, tubular
or ball like, egg like forms. Okay so now we have that
nice - let me - really a three
value system here.

We have two subtly different values in light
and one strongly different value for the shadow.
Now these things blend together
and so for the layman they wouldn't see this
but we're - our job is to see it. So we need to
really focus and look carefully. And so when I see
any kind of change in value I wanna see
if that value lasts any length of time.
If it's just a little change like that, ignore it.
We don't need to deal with that until the very end of the painting, if at all. But
if it's a big area value see where it ends.
And if it's a light value then look for another light value. Let's lighten this up a little bit
more. Look for another light value and see if there isn't
a logic to those light values. And then remember your light
source. And those light values are going to
correspond to our light source and we're gonna find
that those light values consistently get lighter
as they turn to the left or
turn up because that's where the light source
is. Alright so anyway, now we've established that structure,
a secondary structure within the lights.
Two subtle planes within the lights, Different value, different plane.
When I squint at those I still want all the lights
to separate from all the shadows. But when I open
my eyes and look carefully then I'm gonna see that secondary value plane.
That mapping out of value. Let's get that little
lob out there so it doesn't grab too much interest.
Alright now I need to come back
make sure that my shadow shape corresponds to what
I'm doing here and it doesn't quite. We wanna make sure the shadow
shape tracks this value system that we've established. So
I'm gonna come back and I'm gonna darken
my edge of the shadow. By doing that
I can take this dark
value and cover over the slightly lighter value of the shadow and
I can correct it. I'm gonna scoot it in in this case.
Also by doing this I'm creating a core
shadow - see my laws of light
lectures for full explanation of that. And the core shadow
is letting us know that a little bit of light gets into the
shadows. And it looks more real. So the border of the
shadow we're gonna make slightly darker than the interior
of the shadow. And that's gonna create a reflected light
suggestion. It's not gonna be the full illusion of reflected light,
but it's gonna suggest reflected light which is more real, it looks more real.
If we have dead black shadows it doesn't look as real
usually unless you're a Caravaggio and you
can get away with it. But actually it doesn't look as real
with his work either, it's stylized realism.
So typically we want
things a little bit more realistic than that and so we're gonna
make that
decision to force our
shadows a little darker. Alright so now we have a little
bump here. And that bump of course corresponds to the bump we removed
on the contour. So now I want this bump
to correspond with
all this stuff. Everything's gonna track so we can see the
shadow edges out here and the ball shape
a slight squishing of that ball
squeezing out against the other forms. We can feel it right there. Now that
is not in the real painting of course, that's a little construction line I just put in.
But that's gonna track over here
to this little bump. And then
now watch what I'm gonna do - I'm gonna correct
my
hip
(painting)
to be truer to what I see.
(painting)
That little swelling coming out.
Notice that -
now this'll track down here, right there.
And since we're slightly underneath
(painting)
we're slightly underneath - patience - we're slightly underneath,
there we go. There we go. Alright.
I am a professional I can make an arrow.
So underneath that form we're gonna feel that tracking.
Notice that this bump, this bump, and this bump tracked across there.
Again my drawing lectures - I keep referring back I
apologize, but I want to make sure that you get your questions answered.
We can't answer everything in ever pose
So that tracks right across
in perspective, they bump together. But notice that we still
keep our little corner there. And notice that this little swelling
here. Now that I've come back and discovered or added
in that secondary idea. Here I added in
the secondary idea of a swelling
upper hip
against a bulging, lower
hip. Now I'm gonna come back to this side
and see if I can't show some hint of that over here.
And I absolutely can. I can't always show it
but I can usually show it. It's usually there
if I look again. So I'm gonna look again.
(painting)
And I'm gonna find
that this - let's get rid of this
here. We'll leave the outside of our arrow
I worked so hard to put in. I can't bear to lose it now
with all that invested work.
Now watch.
There it is there.
(painting)
Just the slightest
swelling, overlapping, wobbling, tracks across.
Tracks across. And notice this bulge here
(painting)
tracks across here. Now I see
a secondary form in here. This is a little sacral pad.
It's the base of the
spine and it's the back interior of the hips.
And sacral as in sacred because
it's a triangle. The three sided form was the sacred
shape - the key sacred shape for Christianity
for the trinity. So three was important and so it's called
the sacrum. The sacred. And three in many -
actually in most
numerological religions - religions that use numbers
and they all more or less did, the major ones - three was important because you had -
one was the god or the mystery, two was
the life, male female, light and dark, good and
evil, ying yang, that kinda stuff. And
it was the relationship between the two things in life, the
two sides of life. The male, female, light, dark. Three
then is that relationship with the mystery.
With god or the femoral or
metaphysical, the physical with the metaphysical. So three becomes
key. Father, son, holy ghost kinda thing.
So sacrum.
Okay now what I'm doing here, I'm gonna make this stronger than it really is.
Now here's another symmetry going on.
We have the asymmetry but what's going on here is going on here. And so
we have -
let me accent this a little bit more.
We have these little divets here. And I'm making a big deal out of them right now.
And what it is - let me draw it
so you can see it.
(painting)
Here's the - can you see the little triangle?
Right there. There's the sacral pad.
The little triangle of soft, pillowy flesh
that's sitting over that bone underneath. And if you
scratch back there, if you feel back there up above, in your
upper hip area you can feel those little areas. And on the woman
it oftentimes - most often - shows off as just little divets.
A little pocket of slightly dark
value there.
And
let me isolate that again.
Usually you just see these little divets here.
You won't see that clearly
or very clearly. Let's remove this now.
(painting)
So just those divets. And I'm making a bigger deal out of it than Mr. Eakins
did. But
what I want to see here
is the symmetry
of that. Notice that our spine
goes right down to there.
And we want this and this
to sit nicely, symmetrically
around it. If I can get this little floating tone -
it just seems to be a floating tone over there - to track
and relate and play off of the little
tone over here, then it's solid. It anchors that form,
the audience feels it. They wouldn't be able to decipher why, but they'll
feel the solidity of that because what is over here is over here
that belief in symmetry is validated.
And so we need to make sure
that if we feel some little tone, it gets lighter here.
Now why would it get lighter? We can figure it out or maybe we can't figure it out, but maybe
it gets lighter on that plane in that position
it should be getting lighter on the other planes, in similar
positions. Track it through. That's gonna build your symmetrical
your consistent truth. You get a little isolated,
a little dot there, look to see if there
isn't one on the other side to balance it out. Sometimes
the lighting situation, the stretched, pinched dynamic
situation will hide that other side. More often
you just think it's hidden but if you look more carefully it's
really there. Now I made this a bigger deal than our friend did in
his painting to make the point. But he put it there. And
he left a little corner there.
And this corner actually came up
a little higher. Now we're gonna take this symmetry and make
it slightly asymmetrical because this side of the hip
is under different pressure than that side of the hip.
And so these corner might skew off a little bit.
This corner is getting a little lower, this corner is getting a little
higher. This is a squarer, sharper corner.
This is a rounder, less obvious corner.
Much more rounded in feel than square. We
squared it off so we can talk about it but
he's
played that down. Now down here we have this corner here that
we'd so carefully
delineated.
Again this skews off and he
takes it and really rather than putting
the corner here, as it properly would be
in a perfectly symmetrical pose - this isn't perfectly symmetrical because the hips are
tilting because the legs are flexing - he's then
kind of framed that corner with these
two corners, like so.

And that is not - that hurts our symmetry
but it doesn't destroy our realism at all. It's what was happening. And so
we're fine with that. This - we could
drag this down to key across or we can kinda
frame that corner with this corner. And if you do
the big work, then they're gonna give you a pass on
little things, even if you actually do screw it up. And some of these things you're gonna screw up, you know
you're not gonna be able to remember and pay attention to everything. Something's gonna
get lost in the mix or because you made one design choice
in one place, it's gonna limit what you
could do in another and you won't be able to get to that
realism that you need because it would destroy your style or whatever.
Okay. So all the way down this is working.
And we won't belabor the point. Now the last thing is this little
shadow here. And this is what I was alluding to that some of you may have picked up. That's not a very
good shadow shape. It needs to be
pushed up here a little bit
more.
A little higher.
(painting)
And specifically what I would like to see
(painting)
is a slight corner here
(painting)
and a slight corner here. And let's go ahead and
put our core shadow in there now.
And notice how
these two corners - let me put that back there,
track together.
Helping to box over.
And then we have this little tone dragging in here,
these are the erector muscles, the upright muscles that hold you in position.
And this comes all the way down into that sacral pinch.
This has
much more half tone here.
Now I'm gonna go back and soften that.
So I carefully delineated
that boxy idea to make it solid and true
and in correct relationship. And then I came back and
all but lost it. But the thinking was there. The
attention to detail was there and some remnants of that
truth will stay there. So it's important
to really carefully think
these things out. And Thomas Eakins, he was so intent on
getting it right, he was such a realist, and that's always, for me,
in quotation marks, because this isn't realistic stuff.
Photography kicked in big time around this time and
he was a big admirer and actually worked with a little bit
of Muybridge who did these stop action - it was the beginnings of film
basically of motion picture, moving picture
technology. And he did these stop action shots of people and animals
in motion that were very famous, had a huge impact on
scientists and especially on artists trying
to get motion, movement in their work.
And Eakins did his own experimentation
with camera work doing it himself. He was so fascinated. So he
was huge in the preliminary
work and he actually did sculptures, little realized
sculptures, of these set ups in the earlier versions of these
setups. He did realistic - or little sketch, sculptures in
wax of the model, of the portrait, of
William Rush, he was the artist. And
all to do a painting. He ended up doing several
paintings because it became a theme for him to go back again
and he painted a nude portrait - a nude figure in the painting
and Rush had a clothed figure in his
commission and would never have - they say would never have
had a nude figure, it would have been
a scandal at the time. In the earlier
times, Eakins did not have - would not have had a nude figure
in there, the figure would have stayed clothed.
Wherein other times
they would have actually had the nude in the Renaissance they would have had the nude figure
and draw the nude and then they would have clothed the figure
secondarily. They would have first done the studies
as nude and then they'd put the drapery on so they can see - they would have
already analyzed the anatomy and the structures of the nude and
they would see that coming through
in the finished drapery. For example the Sistine Chapel
or type commission. So this was a more modest
time and Eakins as I said actually got in trouble for being
immodest. He wasn't modest enough for the powers
that be and they booted him out.
(painting)
Alright.
So last thing here. We won't go on
into this and really
want this stuff to come down a little bit farther
anyway.
(painting)
I'm being distracted from what I'm supposed to do here.
Taking a break from teaching
you and just playing with my paint for a second. I can't help myself.
Okay so lose that
off. Once you get into a
painting - completely off subject - once you get into a painting
you'll find at some point there's a getting to know each other. Just like a relationship.
You meet someone new, you get to know him or her, you talk -
you carefully talk about subjects, you kinda dance around anything that may
cause trouble and slowly you get to know each other and you start to loosen up
and feel freer and then you just have
a good old time eventually. Same way with a painting.
There's a getting to know each other process
where you're getting to know the subject that you're looking at, looking at the source material
but more importantly you're getting to know what the painting is about,
really is about and really needs and at that point,
once you get to know each other, then it becomes a lot of fun, then you can say
well the painting just wants to be a little darker here, I don't care what the
source material's telling me. My friend here is asking
to be darker or lighter or simplified
or whatever. But you'll find
that eventually it has to be about what the painting needs
and not what the source material demands. And that's
always the danger of working from life is that you got a pretty model
or a handsome man or you're doing a portrait head
and you feel obligated to make it realistic.
And the problem with that is then you don't have
the opportunities to let the painting really take off in its own direction.
It becomes all about the model and not about
what the painting needs. And sometimes that's appropriate. If it is a painting
commission. Other times it's just a shame.
And if you're to look at Michelangelo and some of the real stylists
the model was in service of the painting or the
sculpture. And he
radically destroyed, distorted, the form,
the proportions, the information of that particular
model because the model was there as raw material for
the painting and the really great artists always know
that it's the painting first and the materials
second. The source second. Alright so last lesson here.
I'll shut up and get back to what we're supposed to be doing. Here is the lightest, there's not a
true highlight in the sense of a dot
highlight. There's a flaring out,
a lighter flaring out of this area of the hip.
And so I'm gonna kinda zigzag it and hatch it,
get its four directions
And I might have to do this three or four times to flare it out
correctly. Get it light enough or positioned well
enough or whatever.
And then this tone
is moving
off down here.
(painting)
And bear with me here I'm just gonna lay some of this in.
(painting)
It's a little subtler
(painting)
Alright now, this
flaring out, this tone here - and I am gonna put a dot highlight on it now
so we can mark it's position even though
our friend did not do that.
That highlight
or flaring out of lighter half tone, exactly
corresponds to this shadow. See the symmetry between
this highlight, this is the back plane from here to
here. From core shadow to highlight, that's the
back plane of the hips. And then from here over that's actually a corner
plane. If we were to tip it, we'd see back plane
of the hips, here is the core shadow, here
is the highlight, here is flaring out
to the contours. And then more or less
what we have. And then here is the side plane that's going
back. So notice then
the shadow
creates this lovely, magnificent,
crucial, desperately needed corner.
The highlight is not as
desperately needed but it's still crucial and
useful and appropriate to put in. If we were to lose that
highlight what would
actually happen would be the
form would look like it did this. It would just drop off. We'd lose
that side of the box. The good
news is if we did lose that
(painting)
and
kept a really good, strong, crucial, desperately
needed shadow and or core shadow
the audience would put that corner in for us.
We did most of the work.
The audience desperately wants us to succeed.
That's a nice truth about art is whatever you do in art
you have real cheerleaders. All your audience is
going to your art show hoping they see masterpieces. Hoping they see
the greatest work they've ever seen in their life. The best movie,
the best novel, the best song, the best painting. They want you to
succeed more than anything almost. And so
if you leave out some of the little things, they'll put
them in for you. But some of these key things
are just nice to put in,
they're appropriate, they're fun, you get the zing, you get that extra
pop of form, all that good stuff.

Alright so
we have this symmetry then of tones. As a tone
is changing from dark to light, it's suggesting a
corner and that corner is gonna have some symmetrical relationship
all the way across. You're gonna look for that. Unless it's a
perfect profile or beyond a
three quarter into a perfect profile. If this turned into a three quarter then
this core shadow would be on the edge, on the contour.
This highlight would be in and we'd still have that same symmetry
we'd be going from side plane to back plane and the back plane
would end at the contour and we would lose this secondary
plane but the audience would put it in for us. They would imagine that other
side that we didn't deal with.
So anyway, that's our lesson in symmetry. We want our
forms to track across
our values to track, our contours to track, all
information. Our technique even to track
across as this goes up into
that erector structure, we better feel it
over here. There it is over here.
Going up.
Symmetry. But it's twisting off. This is fading
in a little bit.
Asymmetry. So the balance between the two. And
once you become hyper aware of the symmetry, asymmetry
problem, or the symmetry,
asymmetry opportunity
you can have great fun with that because you can push
things in ways that someone else wouldn't have. You can really play up that asymmetry
or with - as Mr. Eakins did - really carefully
play it down. Or balance it out or let it evolve from being
dynamically asymmetrical to more
quiet symmetrical. Or you can take,
as post impressionists and modernists do,
and take that asymmetry, so you have Picasso, and
go bonkers with it. Go crazy with it and really
really play games
with it. And have fun. So it's a wide open
set of opportunities. And most artists
are so intent on the rendering
they miss those key little corners, they do so much to
anchor the form, to make the form ring true
they miss the design opportunities to play those off,
to maybe make this side a rounder, more
fluid idea. And this square
more boxy idea. They miss those opportunities to get a real
personal vision. So there's so many choices,
so many potentials here. What you have to do is you get
someone, as I just did, to suggest
an idea you hadn't thought to look for, all the sudden you can't stop seeing it
everywhere. Once you - it's pointed out you go
oh of course that's true and you see it. But these things are -
they're hidden treasures. And they're not
obvious. And they're not talked about.
And so most of the time we don't
ever know they're there and it's such a shame because they have
so much chance to enrich our art and
even in those special times, enrich our lives
that we want to -
I'm really just talking so I can paint more.
We really want to play with those. And then once we've been
presented that idea of that new idea, that new
visual component, new possibility, we may
downplay it or even ignore it, just let it happen intuitively.
But to be aware of it is key important and
part of the learning process. And I will shut up, I talked about five minutes too
long there but that's the way I pad my lectures and we'll see you
next time, thanks.

Now to recap what we were trying to
do here is relate across.
If there's a bulge over here and there's
a bulge over here, they're in relationship. This flows
down this way, it also flows across this way.
One of the easiest strategies - one of the most successful, nothing's easy in art -
is to think of boxes with corners and so
that means this whole back section of the hips
has two corners that frame it
and then that moves on here. And so the shadow over here, the core
shadow is gonna be your corner. And it's gonna sit
very faithfully on that slightly quicker movement. It
will feel like a corner. Every once in a while the shadow can be
hitting in such a way because of the angle of the light source that it cuts inside a
major plane but typically it's gonna hug the corners
the quickening moment of that plane. This
area in the hips is fairly flat. There's undulations of course
but it's fairly flat and broad. If we move her into a
profile we'll see that her hips look much more narrow. That's
the side plane of the hips. We move her back into a back plane or a front plane
of the hips and so we've got the core shadow
telling us where the back plane meets that really corner
plane as it bevels out before it goes into the full side and likewise over here,
the highlight does exactly the same work for us. And so we spotted that
highlight to find that architectural moment that turns the form.
And so that's a symmetrical idea. The asymmetrical
idea is of course the lighting is to one side rather
than the other and so one side goes dark, the other side goes light, and
also she is tilted in a slightly asymmetrical position.
She's not exactly back view and her hips are falling
down on this left hip because that left leg is presumably
bending the knee. That's why that would happen, unless she was on an even surface.
And so that knee gives out and that hip
falls down and then this leg stays locked
kneed or close to it. And that's gonna be the pillar
of support that holds up the majority of the weight and that's gonna force
that hip side up also. And so
we worked all the way through, finding those architectural ideas,
those relationship ideas, this to
this, we were particularly looking at corners so that we could track the corner
across and find the axel relationship, the way
it tilts - a fancy way to say it tilts in this case - and
make sure they track across to feel that symmetry. And then because
of the slight dynamics of the pose, then looking
towards the asymmetry. We look to the symmetry first
because that's gonna make it feel true and real. It is symmetrical for
the most part. Everybody's a little bit out of whack I should say
you know one eye is a little different than the other, one ear
might be a little different than the other. You part your hair on one side or the other,
one arm might be slightly bigger or
forearm might be slightly bigger than the other because it's used more. My left foot
is a little bigger than my right foot. There's all sorts of subtle asymmetries
in there. In fact they've done clever little experiments with photography
and they'll take a beautiful model or a famous actor or
whatever and they'll take a picture straight on and then
they'll splice it in half and they'll take this side and flop it
and put it over on this side so that it's the same side
repeated twice so it's perfectly symmetrical and it looks funny. It doesn't look
exactly like that person. Everybody has a slight asymmetry
to them. And that's just part of our personality.
It makes us unique and if we try and fight that too much
we actually lose a little bit of the realism. But for our purposes
we want - not distort - but we want to take
that symmetry and put it in a dramatic, dynamic situation so it's
more interesting. So it is more dramatic. It tells a more interesting
story or suggests a more interesting idea.
And so we're gonna tilt, twist, torque things
in ways to make them more dramatic, more interesting,
more novel maybe. Contrapposto, which is
the twisting -
the classic twisting of the form where ribcage goes one way, pelvis goes
the other, head goes back again, it starts to twist
this way against that, like wringing out a wet towel. That is
specifically designed to create dynamic interest, rather than the early
sculptures that were stiff and straight and frontal. Early
primitive sculptures, early primitive Greek sculptures, the
kouros sculptures were all pure symmetry.
And so the more modern though, starting with the Greeks,
was to look for that dynamic difference which is much truer to the
life. And it gives a sense of action, dynamic action or potential
energy when we torque her into a slightly different
position than pure frontal. It gives that sense of dynamics,
things are in change or about to change or have changed
and again it creates a more powerful
visual. Let me scoop my black up, it's sneaking down
away from me.
Alright so now what we want to do -
we'll add little bits of detail in here as we go but what we really want to do is tie
we'll add little bits of detail in here as we go but what we really want to do is tie
this together. Now one of the things we're
trying to do faithfully is
tie this side to this side. See where the corner of the
hip changed, find it over here.
Getting that complete idea across, that's gonna help tie things together.
But we also want to see how things blend a little softer.
Show a little bit more true character to
Mr. Eakins' paintings and to what a model would be. No model's
gonna have this blocky hip structure. This is a
radical stylization of that, distortion of that.
So we're gonna soften those things and make it look more real. But also what I wanna do is I want
these tones to tie together. In drawing I talk about
structure, which is what we did last in Part 1,
and gesture. Gesture is the relationship
between two forms. So not the shape of
the hand and the shape of the wrist, but how does the
hand flow into the wrist, or break
against the wrist. That's the gesture. The
relationship between the forms. How do we move
correctly, beautifully, dynamically from here
to here and from here to here. There's gonna be a flow up through
and so for us, as painters,
the easiest thing to do is gonna be to use
half tone. What we're gonna wanna do is use the gradation
to slowly move us from dark to light and from top to bottom
and from left to right. That gradation will draw us through.
And it can be a broad gradation - and I'll show you
one right now where we take this hip.
Recharge here.
with some color - or some value I should
say.
(painting)
So I'm gonna lay that in - I'm just gonna take a separate
brush here, in this case a new, clean brush, I'm gonna go along that border.
That's a stiff brush. Somebody didn't clean my brushes.
My assistant didn't clean my brushes. That's probably
because I don't have an assistant.
(painting)
And what we can do is just draw that right across, zigzagging.
Now we soften it.
Whenever you soften, blend, render,
(painting)
an area - render specifically a shadow back towards the light
through those darker half tones - make
sure you don't lose the border of the shadow. We wanna feel...
(painting)
There it is. We wanna feel that core shadow.
That's gonna be our corner, our key corner, our key
explanation of structure and that's gonna create much more
quickly than anything else the illusion of this
being a real form or series of forms.
Okay so I used gradation to soften that up.
(painting)
I'm just blending
them together. Slightly together.
(painting)
Now also I want
each form to flow into the next form.
Now I'm gonna start - one of the strategies I'm gonna have
here is to
soften these
separations here. Because each form is breaking strongly against the
next and that creates great structure, great
volume, but it doesn't have much cohesion. It doesn't
have things blend together, flow
together, fit together well. And so I'm gonna start now softening
these separations
and tying the whole thing together.
So one of the strategies I have when I do my
work is I - as I mentioned in
the earlier lecture I believe - there's a getting to know each other period.
Kinda like a first date. When you're working on your
painting. You've got your reference material to model, or in this case the painting
and you've got your
attempt to get to know that and capture that on
canvas. And it takes a while before you really kinda get a feel
for each other and you can understand what that painting
needs and what that reference material is telling you. You have to kinda have a
plan and often times when we start - especially in the beginnings of
our career, when we're learning this stuff - and we're really always learning this stuff -
but when we're really in the beginning of things,
lack of experience - we don't have a clear vision
of what we want it to be. And that's why working from masters can be really great
It can have some downside. You can start
to get too seduced by the masters because they're masters and
just try and copy them and you're always gonna be a second rate Thomas Eakins or whoever.
But you can also just learn from them and see how they did
it. And then it's important as you move along - and it may not happen
right away, but you wanna start being able to criticize
them and say well I wish, had I been there,
I would have kept 99 percent of what he did because he's better than me right now,
or she's better than me right now, but I would have done this
one thing differently. I would have put in more color or I would have made
the pose a little more dynamic or I wouldn't have made the background
so sketchy and drawn I would have made it really thick paint
and dynamic shapes and everything soft, blurred focus
or whatever. Have a sense or, for me,
this structure of this arm and shoulder is not great
up there. It's not really terrific. I think it could be
a little better done frankly.
So it's important to kind of have that sense
of
individuality. You are you and you're gonna learn
from these guys but you're gonna stay you. You're gonna take
from it some lessons, not all lessons. And you will
take a little bit from Eakins, a little bit from
Sorolla maybe, a little bit from Cézanne, maybe
one or two from Picasso, you know, whoever. And make
this eclectic mix and then your
own experience goes on top of that. Okay so as I'm talking I'm just stroking these things
in. So now we still have all the same information that was there before.
I'm slightly darkening this plane,
this side plane as it moves towards the contour,
to turn this over a little bit. Let's darken it a little bit more.
But what I've done now is I've drawn -
pooled, let me say pooled - these things together
in the hip. And now we're going to...

Come over the top of this. And since
this lecture was done - these two lectures were done a day apart - this
is already starting to dry because we're getting into summer, we're almost at summer,
and things have warmed up. And so this - if I
scrub hard on this with a little bit of solvent in my brush
the painting will break down and move around, but it's
starting to stick.
And so I'm gonna - it's called scumbling -
I'm dragging new paint, or what's left of the
wet paint over the top of the dry paint. So wet paint
dragged over dry paint. And when you scumble
you use very little paint on your brush. It's almost all gone,
it's dragging and that scumbling usually hits the
high points of the canvas or the textured paint and doesn't get down in the
crevices. And it's an easy way to create a gradation. So
now I've softened this in here. And I'm gonna take some of that
paint that's in here and I'm gonna lighten
the spine, a little groove, the
erector muscle of the spine. And this is a very hard edge
and in the shadows against the light
and he's using these very strong
drawn hard edges, which I like.
because I like drawing and paint. Anybody who shows off their
drawing allows a drawing technique to sneak
through the paint, usually gets my attention. So I think
that's interesting. And I think people do it a lot
more than we think. You know the terrific artists
draw a lot more into their paint than
we think. It's not all these big, soft blendings
You can see just that stroke coming down.
Now every time I'm drawing - since this is a vertical
pose - every time I'm painting a vertical
value, I'm very conscious about how it fades
out. We spent yesterday seeing how those values went
more or less from side to side. Stepping over
and a little bit of attention coming down. But now I'm
working more gesturally. And I'm trying to see how
the ribcage is gonna flow into the waste and the pelvis
is gonna flow into the legs. And I am, of course,
still concerned with this. But I mapped that out very nicely
yesterday. And so now I'm really just softening that up. I might adjust
a shape and say oh I wish this was a little bit fatter or smoother
or we can do a pear shape or a tear drop. You know, I'll adapt it,
refine it, edit it, that kinda
thing. A lot of what I do
also towards the end of the painting is take things out. And that's what I just did
at this hip. I took a lot of that stuff out. A
lot of those separations have been taken out and suppressed,
playing down. There's several little things in here that I took out and
played down.
Okay. And we're working
thinner and scumbling or
scrubbing in much more than we would if we were doing a Sargent
or a Sorolla or some of the others just because
that's what Eakins did. Now I'm not trying to faithfully copy his
process, his technique. I'm not really all that interested
in it. We're gonna do - we're gonna take all these, not all of course,
but we're gonna take a lot of these great masters, and Eakins I
suspect will be one of them, and I'll show you their paint
technique more or less. But I'm not gonna pretend that it's exactly the way they worked, it's just
my observations and it's my way of getting their
effect. And so it will have some
faithfulness to how they worked, but for the most part it will
be an adaptation of what they're doing or what they did.
And
we'll get the effect that way.
So I'm just scrubbing in
these darker gradations, moving up. So now this is
simplified out. Now look what we have here. We had just kinda a
series - you can see this side hasn't been affected - more or less
these boxy corners stepping out and they
faded out but they didn't have any real direction. So now what I've done is
I've softened this egg against this egg, I've turned them much
more truly into eggs, whereas before they were
faceted forms, and now what I want
to do is I want to see how each form is directed,
has a direction, a channel that flows up into
or along with the other form. So
little tone here, flows in here. Big tone
here, flows in here. Notice how these are both kinda
tilting towards the smaller egg and then moving up the spine, the erector
muscles of the spine up here.
Now I want to
drag this hip - well we can keep going here but let's go on up here.
I wanna drag this hip up into
(painting)
the
ribcage and waist. So this is gonna pull up here
need to get a little bit lighter,
(painting)
little bit lighter. And notice how I'm
incrementally pushing that value. I'm not attacking it with a
really light value, I'm slowly
adding. And by dragging across,
scumbling across, with just a bit of paint
on your brush. If it's not enough you get a little bit more, if it's too much you wipe it off.
This is a safer way to
render if you haven't worked in paint before.
That Sargent method, that alla prima method where you put in a big
mix, a big old pile of paint,
it'll be a shovel load. And then you'd scoop it on your
brush more or less with a big charge of paint and you'd lay in
those dabs and then you'd smooth them out like butter.
Big pat of butter and it'd be a thick
covering that goes off. That kind of work is
juicier often times and more exciting to see for us,
not always, but oftentimes our taste
will like that better. It's harder to do though.
So this is a way of getting into paint where
you're using just enough paint to cover what's underneath.
And in the case of the legs down here
and throughout here I didn't even completely cover. As I got into those
middle half tones we really see the tones canvas
coming through. It's still doing work for us and creating some of the
value information for us and
that's a good thing. That saves us trouble.
So
just by scrubbing that in you can see how I slowly adjust it. Now we have
this little shape here. Whenever you have a floating tone
I wanna know where it connects. It needs to connect to something.
And so it's gonna connect back down
to the front side. Now see
how I laid it in there and then you saw I just dabbed it with my
brush because this still had that darker tone on it. If I dabbed
it with this I'd just make it darker yet, and I wanted to make it subtler and lighter. So I took
my tool, instead of a brush, a finger,
and as I rubbed that dark value
it blended and faded into the light value and I get a natural gradation.
It fades away. But what it's doing is
it's coming from the back in here and those ribs are coming
around to the side. So coming around the side in front and so that tone tracks
that way. And it's basically going from the inside of the
upper ribcage to the outside
of the lower hip. And so we end up getting this
rope - twist of rope,
idea. Right there. And so
most of these forms in here - let's do another one -
(painting)
are going from the high inside to the low
outside. That's how they're tracking, that's how they're flowing,
that's the gesture. So what I wanna do is I wanna find each
shape and I wanna give it
it's own character and then I wanna see
how that shape or value or detail
flows into the next. And it won't always flow, sometimes
it'll break away. If you think of a snowman
each form breaks away from the next.
But there could still be ways to tie them together,
but sometimes things'll just break away. This tone
breaks away from that tone. And there can be ways to suggest
its connection, I'll show you a little bit of that. But for the most part it doesn't
flow naturally, easily into the
greater environment.
Alright so -
and we can go on and on with this and we won't because
what we have is enough. it gives us enough information.
So let's now come
back and I'll just accent that value if it needs to be a little
stronger I'll push it stronger by adding a stronger light or I'll push it
stronger by adding a stronger shadow.
The other thing - well we'll save that actually I don't want to give you
too many things at once.
(painting)
Okay so accenting these things a little bit.
And now here's the arm pit area
and there's several subtleties here I'm not gonna worry about.
When in doubt, simplify. We don't have to be
exactly Thomas Eakins and we won't be
so we just do the best we can or we make our choices.
I changed these shapes a little bit to my taste. They're not
exactly what he did but they're referenced from what he did.
I stole from him shamelessly and then changed it enough so nobody
notices kind of thing. We take the idea
and we adjust it.
Picasso said that I only steal from the best and he did.
And that's okay. You take from really
talented, the great masters, and then
you adapt it. And you put it - you change -
you use their technique maybe but you change the subject matter.
Use their tonal composition but you change the color.
Use their alla prima painting skills but you use a
different style of drawing and that will
make it yours. And so you're really putting together
kind of a jigsaw puzzle of information. You're taking the very
best from the very best and making it your own
and then you might be lucky to come up with a few little, a couple
little inventions of your own that are the way you put
down paint or choose subject matter or something.
But for the most part, we're learning from what went on before.
Painting is a very old and time honored
craft. And so coming up with something completely new
at this point is probably not gonna happen.
Stephen Jay Gould called that the right wall.
Eventually somebody broke the four minute mile but probably
no one will ever break the three minute mile.
And so different
endeavors or crafts or
modes of thought have a limit to how far you can take them and push them
is the thinking. And paintings been around - realist painting's been around
a long, long time. The Greeks
did it, the Egyptians did it,
on some level it was realism and
we're not gonna probably be able to come up with something
brand new in realist painting. But we can take a little bit of
this, a little bit of that, put together things that
nobody thought to put together before and come up with something fresh
and exciting and in that sense it will be new. And that is the
most efficient way to be creative. Is don't
try and come up - don't start painting with jello because nobody's ever done it before
or painting with your own blood because nobody's ever done it before -
well actually somebody has done that - but
take things nobody thought to put together before.

So take the tonal -
absolute gorgeous tonal composition
of Rembrandt and do it
with bright, Sorolla, on the beach
colors. And then
change the subject matter maybe. Make it instead
of Saints, make it boxers. That kind of thing.
(painting)
Okay. So we're not too interested in the limbs, I'm just gonna leave that in,
bury them, do that. It really is kind of a
shorthand way of saying it's breaking up, fading out,
to be continued but we won't continue it.
Alright now, each of these tones, notice
that every time I have a value, whether it's
a big shape of tone or a
sliver of tone, which is more consistently true, in
this case because we have this light that's catching just
the far side of these forms and so the shadow's fairly
thin, and so it ends up becoming very linear.
And so now watch how
I'm gonna soften this a little bit - watch how this little shadow has a place to go.
I go from the back side of the deltoid to
the front side of the deltoid. I also go from the
back side of the deltoid to this acromion process,
this spine - not the acromion process, this
spine of the shoulder blade. Acromion process is on the
front of the collar bone.
And it flows into that. And
now watch - what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna look for
a fun ride. I wanna know where a
tone, a shape, a structure
is gonna take me. I wanna see how it takes
me to those other tones, shapes, and structures. So this goes around the
other side, the back side of the deltoid finally
flows around and describes the front side of the deltoid, comes back
around this bump
and goes right up here.
I'm gonna darken that so you can see it
more clearly. Now
I've taken
this deltoid and taken
us all the way - I'm gonna darken this a little bit so you can see it
again - I've taken you all the way back into
the spine.
Darken it yet. And the seventh
vertebrae that's so strongly shown. The
seventh vertebrae is the neck
vertebrae, the last neck vertebrae before the
thoracic, the rib cage vertebrae starts.
Number eight is on the ribcage, number seven is the last part of the neck.
It's a knob in the back here. So I've
taken us all the way over there. So notice how
the tones flow. They go
somewhere. And oftentimes they can go several places.
Think of this as a babbling brook that's going around
the rocks, over the logs, splits off into a little
channel, comes back into the whole tributary
or whatever you call it. And it just keeps moving downstream. It always,
or almost always, finds an out to
break away from the individual eddy
little current, trapped current, and flowing back into the
greater whole. That's what I want out of my tone.
I want these tones, these values, these shapes,
to show their great beauty, their great
individual character and yet I want to see how they
flow, how they cohere, how they tie back into
the greater whole.
Alright now this
area in here is
let me get a little darker -
(painting)
is a little darker. So I just scrubbed in a darker value. Notice how this is
going from light to dark. That's what I want. I wanna see this
light below and light to the outside going dark above and
dark to the inside. And I'm gonna make it even darker. And I may
end up screwing up something else up here doing it. Let's say I go over the top
of that spine and muck it up. That's okay, I want this
darkened. Now notice what I'm doing, this is a strategy.
What I've noticed here, and I haven't really talked about it yet,
is this is the lightest part of the painting, lightest part of the figure.
And as it goes up here it gets a little bit darker
and as goes inside, as we've just said, it gets a little bit darker. So I want
this - despite all the beautiful, interesting,
forms, I want this as a value
system, as a tonal composition, to get ever darker.
Ever darker. Now what I can do, and I have been doing here,
is painting each half tone
and highlight - although these aren't true highlights but let's just call it that for simplicity sake.
My full range of light side. Each half tone and highlight I make
them ever darker. The highlights, the lighter half tones
get a little darker as they go up. Every once in a while something will flare a little lighter
maybe, but overall it's darkening, dimming as it
goes up. And I rendered it that way and I didn't say a word to you.
That's the harder way to render it. The easier way to render it
is to put a gradation of half tone over this
whole upper torso and let it gradate ever lighter
down to this hip area. And that's what we're
doing here. We're gonna gradate this inside
ever darker and
notice I can come over the top of my
other areas and kinda glaze over it if it's dry enough
or if it's sticky enough or if there's very little paint
I can kinda stroke over it. But if it's thick paint like
a Sargent or it's really wet
because I used a lot of turpentine or solvent or
medium then it won't work so I have to let it dry.
Okay so I destroyed some information here now by putting that
gradation but now look what happens when I come back now
and reapply, rediscover,
bring back those dark
details, the shadow of the shoulder blade.
(painting)
Here's the shadow
of the spine.
(painting)
And here's a little
striation
of form along that spine
that erector, array of erector muscles.
Gonna help and hold up. Here is that
tone fading out
as it goes up.
Let's pretend there's something in here just to add more detail,
right across this is going up into here.
This is going down
into here. So
now see what happens. I went ahead and put all my stuff back,
I got my toys back. But those
toys, that stuff, is laying on top of this darker
base. And so we get a natural gradation going up. Let's do it on
the leg here. Now this is not gradate into darkness, it stays
pretty much flat light throughout. From
here to here it's all pretty much the same illumination but
mainly because this is the biggest, simplest form. That side plane and that
corner plane is catching strong light and flaring out and so it
feels to be the lightest area. But if we tracked
the highlights, they don't vary very much.
They fade out a little bit here but they pick up again very strongly up here so the
areas that have little - a lot of nuance, a lot of
corrugation to them, wobbles to them, they're catching less light
and getting overall darker. But the light source itself
is fairly, consistently strong. It's a north light window so it would be
throughout. It's not dropping off like a spotlight would. I've got
a spotlight bouncing from above down and so things
drop off, it gets slightly darker here than here.
It's not happening there but we're gonna pretend it does. So I'm gonna take
my
paint and I'm gonna make this thicker.
I'm not gonna do an Eakins scumbling, just to show you the
differences. I'm gonna make this thicker. So that means I have
to mix a lot of paint.
(painting)
Alright. And I
always rotate my brush so I'm not getting a chunk of white on the back
side. This wants to be well mixed enough that we don't get little flares of white
or light especially because they'll look like little highlights that are
scintillating across the surface, that shouldn't be there and we don't want
darks because they'll look like little divets. So we wanna make sure
it's pretty well blended. There's a technique of under blending
I use when I work with a lot of bright color, like an impressionist, that I'll show
you in another lecture but that's another lecture. Okay so now look at
my gradation here.
And we'll take it up into the hips. And since this paint
is fairly dry because it's yesterday's paint and whatever I did over the top
of it was very, very thin, meaning not thin
liquid thin but not much on there,
I can scrub right over the top and see that lovely gradation. I
love gradations because they describe
form more carefully. They allow us to find
the gesture, how we flow from one form to the other form and
they control - they fine tune your composition.
Now by doing this I'm making the half tone
close in value to the shadow. And I might
end up even making it the same value
as the shadow. And that
makes it less interesting down here. You're not gonna
look here as quickly because the light side and the
shadow side are almost - have almost lost their
contrasting differences. But it makes it more
interesting as an overall composition because it moves you through -
we can flow from more contrast to less contrast.
We see differences everywhere. As this forms turns
over it changes value. As it moves down now
it changes value. So gradations are
wonderful things in terms of getting control of the
your interests. The timing -
excuse me - the timing of your piece. What we're gonna see first, what we're gonna see second
that kind of thing. And if you go to my tonal
composition lectures in painting I go through that carefully.
And they'll be some advanced classes on that eventually
that will take you even farther. Now again
I can put my rendering on it. This
area of hamstring
is separating against the side plane of the
quadricep here. The vastus externus is out here
and the gluteus maximus is down here, coming
in from the outside -
gluteus maximus coming inside to outside, and on the
outside side is that
vastus internus that helps create this profile. They're coming
out here and the hamstring structure
is
binding against it a little bit. And what I like
about that is again it takes this ball shape
that we've worked so hard on
and shows us how we flow down. Look at this lovely waterfall
here. It has an analogy to this
waterfall up here, this S curve up here, S curve down here.
So they're similar symmetry, and yet they're different.
This is in the dark tones, this is in the light tones, this
is cutting back more sharply, this is flowing
more languidly. I like that word languid.
It's very literary.
In most of these
tonalist painters, Brown School painters, much of the shadow
is just created - the illusion of shadow is created
by that introduction to core shadow.
The soft border of the shadow and a little bit of
line work inside. That's about all he did.
Little more than that but that's all he did
for the most part and that's all we'll do
because we're not gonna take this quite as far as our friend here did.

Okay and now
I can keep adjusting. Notice when I do that gradation -
I have to go this way with the gradation stroke to gradate that
leg darker to lighter. And that mucks up my shapes
a little bit. It mucks up my drawing, my structures. So I have to come back
and correct those. And that's why all the really terrific
painters were also - not all of them, that's not true, there's some
styles where it's not true, impressionism - but for these
Brown School structural painters, where they're creating well
drawn, well conceived forms that ring true,
they're terrific draftsman.
And so they knew, they could
find that leg again and again and again and if they had to do it a second time they could draw
it just as well or even better the second time as they did the first time.
And so they're not too worried about losing
the drawing, they're worried about the overall tonal effect
and color harmony effect. And so now I'm coming
back and correcting that distorted leg
from my gradation and giving it its due.
(painting)
Its shape and proportion and character. And so now
we've got that hamstring coming in, going down the back of the
leg.
And all the other stuff here. And we're not gonna take this
really any farther or much farther. I mean
bring a couple lighter tones on there for a second. But you can see how I can come in
now and slowly or quickly, depending,
reestablish the
truth of that lower leg
or that leg area going off here. So now that's
working pretty well isn't it? And not a lot of time was spent. And I was -
I was using a very fussy style, which slows you down.
This Eakins' style is a fussy style. It's a renderers style where you noodle around.
It's not - the alla prima style is you're moving
quickly. Those long, fluid, languid - I'll use that word again.
Languid strokes will take you down through it. They're describing
planes and forms but they're also flowing
into the whole. The whole technique is often times very fluid
and it takes you into the next. Takes you into the next.
All the way through. Okay so now let's go ahead and put in our
highlights here.
(painting)
There it is.
Let's say there's a highlight on there. There's the highlight. Now look at that highlight.
There it is there. There's the value of that highlight.
Does that look like a highlight on that toned canvas?
No. When it gets into a darker
value scheme, then it starts to look like a
highlight. But look at the difference between that
and let's give now a highlight, even though there wasn't a true
one right on the hip there. Now look at that
highlight. Look at that highlight. And I'm going to
go ahead, I'm gonna reload.
I'm gonna replace that first highlight with that. Look at that.
Now that's way too strong isn't it? We were saying that in our world
things that go down to the bottom of the canvas get
darker and darker and subtler and subtler. That is not a subtle statement.
That is a contrasting, sharp,
strong statement. And so I need to take that off.
Reestablish. I'm gonna wipe off my brush.
Reestablish
the tone there. And come
back again with my
subtle highlight. So now
notice that the half tones get
darker and darker and darker. And the highlights get darker and darker and darker.
You'll see that in Rembrandt. You'll have a highlight up here
and here that is very strong. The highlight down here is
very weak and then maybe there's no highlight down in the hands.
So we have to be faithful to that
gradation. Now it's your world, you can make it
anything you want. You can say in my world the half tone gets darker and darker and
darker but the highlights get more and more contrasting.
You may well do that for all sorts of reasons. If this is
a little boy on the beach, like a Sorolla,
who's oily because he's hot in the sun or has put
sunscreen - oil on, suntanning lotion on so he's literally
oily, maybe you get real strong highlights.
Or the little boy's playing in the surf, when the water washes over him you get these really strong
highlights of the wet waves going over as a film over the body
and it flares out those highlights. So it can be all sorts of things for all
sorts of reasons. Or you can make up a unrealistic
reason for it and apply that logic.
Okay so you can see the difference now. The
difference between the analysis of the form and
the composing of the forms.
We analyze the forms and each form got a little more
important than it probably should have. It leaves for a
young lady in a demure pose in
this period of painting. For our own style
or for different purpose this might be just the thing.
We might really want to block these things out. There's all sorts
of art movements that would do that. But for Eakins
it was about subtle grace, femininity,
that meant softness. If we look to an Ingres. I-N-
G-R-E-S. Ingres. Dominique Ingres. It would have been even
more subtle. This would have been played down even more.
He would not have done this kind of dramatic drop off. So it would have been
even a more subtle, more feminine,
more watery design. His watery nymph,
this is supposed to be a watery nymph for a fountain they were doing. Allegory of a
water. So these fluid
forms - this doesn't look so fluid. This looks like the allegory for the
a cliff face. Rocky, craggy,
you know blocky forms. This is more fluid but Ingres would have been
more fluid yet. He would have really bent this arm, really played
none of this stuff would have cascaded as sharply it would have just
flowed like melting honey kind of thing.
So - but you can see the
way we're going with this. You know where we could take this whole thing.
So
flows on down. We'll just
leave this as is. Let me make one statement here though.
This
form of the leg
is cut off - I just said
we're gonna leave it and then I didn't leave it.
You get going on this stuff and you just can't help yourself, you just got to
take your ideas and see if they'll work.
Take that area that deserves so much better treatment
and see if you can't give it a little better treatment. And so it's hard
to say no. But
basically what's happened here - not basically, what has happened here is
here's the gluteal fold right there, the cast shadow
of that hip or this hip actually casting across that leg
and then these forms
tuck under and so you get a little gradation that I put in. But I'm not gonna
try and make this leg gradate, I'm
gonna leave it lighter even though that would not be probably
too kosher with what we've done here. We'd want this to drop off at least as much
because it's either farther from the light and catching more glancing light
so that doesn't track well but we're gonna leave it because this is
kinda the analysis of the form and this is the composing, rendering
of our soft, lovely
solutions for that figure - that feminine series of forms.
Now this gets cut off from that. One of the things we can do
is just what we've done here, we'll do here.
And just giving a gradation
helps tie those together. This darker gradation
ties in with that and helps to connect it,
draw it through. It softens stairstep interruption
that's this and makes it more of that flowing, water
idea. But also he's come back in and picked up
he's shrewdly picked up these little
forms. And it makes something that's very simple a little more interesting.
You know there's not a lot going on
here. This leg is pretty
simple down here. And he's
done this. Now a different artist, your teacher for example
might turn that into something more
Baroque. And actually let me lighten that down here.
And actually bring that in
very energetically. That wouldn't be appropriate for this
painting because this is not about that kind of energy,
this is a feminine, watery form. The
water is a feminine ideal.
And so we don't want - we want that
old school version of it. The passive, the
demure, soft
all the kinda stereotypical stuff that was associated
at this time.
But those little hatches now start to
staccato,
kind of blend together. So we have hatches of dark and light, dark and light, and then
they get a little lighter and lighter and lighter. I did the same thing here and it helps to
integrate this separated light arm into
that separate, dark
background down here. Or we could do it with the -
(painting)
we could do it all sorts of places.
And that helps to kind of
draw those together.
(painting)
Like that. It gives kind of a vibration and a
connection. I do that kinda stuff all the time because it gives a sense of energy and is
almost always what I'm after in my work is that sense of
movement, not potential energy like we have here. That
dynamic asymmetry is potential energy. It's just moved from
the symmetrical, it's just moved into the dynamic, it's moving into greater
dynamics, all that kinda stuff. With my work I'm actually trying to show it
moving at the moment rather than capturing a moment
in the range of motion. I'm trying to show the motion. So I use a lot of these little
speed lines I call them. They're really
knock offs from comic books. I'm stealing from the comic book
vibration of punching the nose or a rocket ship
a line - speed lines of the rocket ship taking off, that kinda thing.
Okay so anyway, that helps to break that up and bring that
together. So if we
just scrubbed over this
even, glazed over that, you could soften
those areas
and it starts to look closer and closer to
that finish we would hope for if we
were in Eakins camp here. If we're trying to
mimic Eakins and
we would want
soften those things. And that
(painting)
can be
done. There's our little core shadow again.
And then let's find our tone that we want here.
(painting)

Now whenever you get a little area of
accent then I wanna see how it
moves off. It's gonna move this way, it's gonna move
this way.
Maybe it hatches up that way. There's an out.
It gets a little darker and then it fades away. It flows
back, it bumps back, it wobbles over
(painting)
Kinda stroking along the border
and dragging those tones
out.
And just that simply we can get...
(painting)
Fingers are great tools.
It saves me time. This is
way too light of a highlight for that and so I'm using my finger
to wipe a lot of the paint off.
To get exactly what I wanted there in terms of the value rather than
going back and mixing it again.
(painting)
And even this - look at
the
personality of this little spine.
Let me play it up a little bit more.
See it wobble away?
Like that. Even that just kind of
signatures, just trailing off and fading away.
If it was one thing and then wobbles it slowly
becomes something else as it wobbles. And so that little - i'll do that
kind of thing a lot too. I did it here. Much more
stylized than the shapes he did. Those little wobbles take us over,
there's a feeling that there's a form that happens
and then the wobble moves away from that form and moves into another
form that happens. And then fades away into a third form
that we maybe never get a chance to explain. That's what these kind of things are doing.
And so they're lovely little
shortcuts to give us a sense of change.
Also, since that back is arched
the hips are going back into the waste and the ribcage is coming
down into the waste, the waste is actually binding up, pinching a little bit in the back
and so as that
fight between those big forms happens, this little
area of the spine is getting pinched. It's not getting pinched as
greatly as this is getting pinched. It's getting pinched and so it wobbles.
So whenever you get a pinch you're gonna get a wobble or a zigzag
happening
in that case and so it gives a sense of the dynamics
between the forms.
And then the last thing
we'll do is we're gonna correct
this a little bit.
and push this lighter.
(painting)
And
(painting)
Place this darker. And so the
background then becomes less interesting at the lower hip,
the contrast between the hip and the background becomes less interesting
and becomes more interesting
at the top of the hip. And that's
how he has it there. I made it a little more dramatic
so you can get the idea. In general I'm gonna take these things,
hit you over the head with it a little bit more. I'm gonna use the subtly of the
old master because I'm not as subtle but I want to
make the point. Make sure you get the point and so I'll
overshoot them a little bit and
in that sense we'll lose some of the beauty of the
effect but we'll get the lesson more clearly. Alright.
So let's stop there and
I'll see you next lesson when we will talk about
something. I don't know what yet but we'll talk about something and we'll have some fun with it.
So I hope that helped. Again I hope you take these lessons,
look at them several times. You can't learn this kinda stuff
with one shot unless you're a better
artist than me but
you wanna look at it several times. Let it play in the background
even, look at it, have it on while you're working, and then try
and copy it. Freeze frame it and try that effect. You see the way I scumbled,
see if you can scumble. What you need to do is learn how
this works with that and how much paint you
have to have on there to get the effect. Do I put a lot of paint on?
Do I put a little paint on? Do I mix exactly the right value or do I
mix a value that's overshot because there's already value
on there and it's gonna mix together. All those basic things
eventually you take for granted, but in the beginning they're great, great mysteries and
the only way to solve those mysteries is not just by watching
someone else do it but trying it. How exactly am I
gonna get this darker when it started out lighter, without destroying
that beautiful rendering I did? How can I take
this shape and move it over three
quarters of an inch because I drew it in the wrong place? So those kind of problems
to be solved are crucial. And the first two or three
or twenty times you'll screw things up probably. You won't get it right but eventually
you'll figure out oh if I put on a little more paint or a little less paint
or if I use dryer paint and don't keep dipping my brush in the
solvent and if I wipe that dryer or switch brushes,
that works for me. Or a bigger brush here, a small brush there.
You're gonna find all sorts of secrets that allow you
to do your magic. And some of them will be
the way I do it and many of them will be your own inventions. It works
for me, it doesn't work for you, you need something different. And so
you experiment and you try and look for new solutions
or you go to the other lectures and see how the other teachers did it. We're all gonna do
it a little bit differently. We're all talking about the same thing
and we have generally the same aesthetic but that doesn't mean
we'll do everything or speak about everything the same way and that's a great
service for you because you can go to a Vilppu
or Danny's classes or whoever else,
Erik Olson's classes, any of the different teachers and you can look at
how they talked about it and how they demonstrated it
and which great paintings they used to get the point across. And you might go
oh that's what Steve was talking about. When he said it it didn't quite click but now that I see it
over here, aha. Or now that I've practiced it two or three
times aha I got it. So go get it.
Take this and see what you can do with it and we will see
you as I said, next lesson.