I just found this great Kim Jung Gi interview by the great drawing instructor Stan Prokopenko highlighting the role of observation and hard work over talent.
Personally I don't believe in talent but I believe in drive. Some people are more driven than other and will therefore work harder.
Observation is an other great habit if you want to be good at drawing, the more you observe, the wider your visual memory will become and that's exactly what Kim Jung Gi explains in that insightful video:
Talking about brushstrokes, I have been following Vladimir Volegov for quite some time but only realised lately that he has also been posting more "behind the scenes" and timelapses on his Youtube channel.
An interesting discussion about colour through history in relation to a National Gallery exhibition "Making colour" in 2014 in London.
Ashok Roy, Director of Collections, and Caroline Campbell, Curator of Italian Paintings before 1500, in conversation about the 'Making Colour' exhibition.
Great video essay on the history of brushstrokes retracing the changes from the fast drying egg tempera technique requiring multiple layers of paint usually applied in cross hatching to obtain a soft look to bolder techniques with the adoption of slower drying oil starting with Titian and the use of dabbing, scraping, smoothing, scumbling and impasto painting.
The artists highlighted are :
- Jan Van Eyck
- Da Vinci and the Sfumato technique
- Titian
- El Greco and the use of hog hair bristle brushes to achieve bolder brushstrokes and palette knives and a comparison with Caraggio
- Rubens
- Velasquez and Hals
- Rembrandt
- Van Ruisdael
- Constable
- Turner
In the second part we are looking at the work of :
- Corot
- Manet
- Renoir
- Cezanne
- Seurat
- Van Gogh
- Gaugin and Cloisinism (outlines)
Part 3 will cover Sargeant and abstract contemporary artists:
Shape of your head: round, oval, squarish, thin, wide, etc.
Angle and length of the jawline: pointed, round, or square
Height of the forehead: distance from the eyebrows to the hairline
Distance between the eyes: generally the distance between the eyes is the same as the width of an individual eye
Distance from the eyes to the side of the head: this is also generally the same as the width of one eye
Depth of the eye sockets. You don't want your eyes to look like they are sitting on your face. It is important to get the lights and darks correct between the brow bone, the cheek bone, and the eye to convey a sense of the eyeballs seated in their sockets.
Shape and angle of the eyebrows
Length and width of the nose. Generally the length of the nose from between the brows to the bottom of the nose is the same as the length of the ears.
Distance from the bottom of the nose to the mouth: this is about one-third of the distance from the bottom of the nose to the chin.
Width and fullness of the mouth and lips
Fullness of the cheeks and angle of the cheekbones
The face is divided roughly into thirds with the hairline to the eyebrows being one-third, the eyebrows to bottom of the nose the next, and the bottom of nose to chin the next.
The outer edges of the nose line up with the inner corner of the eyes.
Generally the outer corners of the mouth line up vertically with your pupils.
Great presentation of an exhibition that took place at the Indianapolis Museum of Art few years ago. The exhibition explains where colour pigments come from, from mineral to organic and ultimately synthetic.
The Egg Tempera technique has been widely used up until the 15th century where it gradually got replaced by the use of oil as a binder instead of egg yolk. Egg Tempera offers water resistance and durability but could only be used on hard panels when oil finally allowed the application on canvas without cracking.
Here is a great video demonstrating how egg tempera paint is made :
