Recently I began attending a weekly figure drawing sessions. I always thought that the best way in the world to getting better as an artist, no matter what medium or genre you’re into, is to do live figure drawing. The models so far have been fantistic dressing up in costumes and utilizing various props.
One of the best ways to improve your artwork is to copy somebody else’s work. I’m not talking the swipe of the week here or trying to pass off an entire issue of an Adam Hughes Gen13 as your own work. I’m talking about learning from masters.
I’ve found that one of the biggest weaknesses in my work that the lack of life. To that end I’ve been working on getting some life into my brush strokes. One of my favorite artist that does that well is Gregory Manchess. I’m hoping that by coping some of his painting that I’ll gain an understanding of his work and better be able to apply certain aspects to my own work.
Here is the first one. I’m working from a copy of one of his oil paintings (left) and painting digitally with photoshop.
What I learned!
First, this guy is incredible talented. The first thing I found was how much easier the painting is if I take some time and do a pretty tight drawing to build my painting from.
There is a lot of be desired digitally when it comes to “touch” with a brush. In real life you don’t realize how much control and variation you have using your mitts. A slight roll of the brush or a dab, dab to very lightly blend something is much harder digitally than with traditional oil. Manchess has finesse galore in the handling of his brush and I felt I had to be more bold and confident to get a semblance of his work. I did almost no blending of one color into the next, instead I let a layering of similar values make transitions. I love the look of this and will think twice in my work when I want to gradate one color to another.
I also learned to be more economical with my strokes. I tried to be less pit, pit, pit, smear, pit, smear and more BAM, BAM, BAM.
Value/color is a big deal painting like this because you need to get that right when you put down your stroke. There’s not a lot of room for messing around with paint after you put it down because the life of that stroke will be diminished. So, I didn’t do any glazing type things like painting over with my brush on 10% to smooth out things or alter their color. You can see how I missed the color/value in the purples around the check bone that transition into the hightlight. Mine are much too brown and over all it’s too anagolous in color.
That is it for my first study. I’m hoping that by explaining all this in a post my ideas will be clearer to myself and I’ll retain more of what I’m trying to learn. Hopefully, you’ve gotten something out of it too.
The reference is from George Bridgeman. I saw a post of an artist I admire though I can’t remember who. Anyway, he said that to really know something draw it 18 times. That has a ring of truth to it. Repetition can help you understand a subject and the form it takes to draw it. After that though you still have to be fluid and flexible enough to keep the life in your drawing and not just put down the exact same lines in a pattern. We want lively happy lines, not boring dead lines.
