Portrait commissions in Amsterdam, Tips for Working from Photos

As you can tell by the title of this latest post, I decided to feed lord Google a bit more content about my portrait commissions in Amsterdam.

There, now that I've used the keyword, I will tell you about a nice little portrait I made while playing around with some pastels. In doing so I will touch upon some of the topics that I discuss during my Amsterdam painting lessons, regarding color temperature, working from life versus working from pictures and impressionistic color.  Mostly, however,  I will try to discuss my process when working from photo, and things I do to try and obtain a better overall result.

I will use some high res images to illustrate this point and hope that this helps you relate to my color examples.

Here is an original photo that I took from my nephew Luke Patrick while he was toying around with his food during breakfast:

So lets discuss some of the things I try to do when making a photo for a later portrait commission or my own projects. 

Here are some tips:

Tip # 1: I know this is a tall order, but learn about portraiture

Obvious poses, people smiling while looking at the camera and that sort of thing makes for a tacky result.  An artistic portrait captures who the person is, while if you take a snapshot of the person smiling, it looks somehow timebound. Muscles in the face don't maintain an authentic smile for too long so a big smiling portrait looks unnatural and too photo-like. 

If you look at the work of all the great portrait artists in Amsterdam including the old masters, rarely will you see a big smile.  Those were saved for party scenes in the sort of raise-your-cups moment, or tavern scenes.

The best photos for portrait or otherwise will capture the person totally caught in some activity, their mind is perhaps in the moment, or elsewhere, but certainly not thinking of the camera.


Remember, this photo will be the basis for the portrait commission and the artist cannot compensate for a poor pose.

In the case of this particular photo, I set my camera to silent mode, made sure the flash was not active, and the proceeded to make pictures of the unsuspecting Luke throughout breakfast.  In the end I had many many shots to choose from and select for the best light, posture, expression, etc.


Tip # 2: Use the best camera, borrow if necessary

This point is extremely important.  Don't expect to make a picture with your mobile phone and then have a great reference for your portrait. 

Cameras do nasty things to images as it is.  The values tend to be compressed, colors that you see in nature disappear and unless your model is totally still and you're using bracketing, anything other than a nice overcast day will result in darks that are totally black and highlights that are totally white, making the useful tonal range far smaller than what your eye would give you in real life.

Personally, I invested in a Leica, the best of the best.  Leica has a long German tradition of making the best optics in the world, and a big part of what they give you is the ability to avoid chromatic aberration, or plainly stated, they don't distort color.  Therefore the photos I get from it are the closest I've seen to working from life.

Now unless you're a portrait artist the investment may not be justified, but there are some compact versions that you may want to consider.  Other good cameras such as new Canons and Nikons may give you good results as well.



Tip # 3: Select your light conditions wisely
Drawing and painting really boils down to portraying light.  When making a portrait what you're really doing is portraying how light wraps around someone's face.

Keeping in mind that cameras have limitations, try to work with what your camera can do.  A portrait in a dark room may be a great moody and mysterious project to make, but your camera may not allow for a great result.

Full sunlight on someone's face is not always esthetically nice, plus is likely to make them squint.  Interior lights that are too yellow could end up making the face look jaundiced or fake-tanned once the picture is translated to a painting. 

Try to find a pleasant light.  Masters use to work with overcast northern light.  This makes for clean crisp colors and no dramatic shadows.   This looks nice, though you must be good in handing your values.

Others use a direct white light, which makes the light-dark effect more dramatic on the portrait and helps give the face lots of structure.



Tip # 4: Use Photoshop to its full advantage
When you want to make a portrait from photo, a big mistake is to think that great photographers just point and shoot. 

Typically what is happening is professionals spending a large amount of time setting up the light and environment, the model, making a very large number of shots, and finally post-processing or editing.

This editing used to be about how films were revealed in a dark room. Now it's all about photoshop. 

Get used to fiddling around with Photoshop until you have what you want. Take care not to go too crazy with tacky digital effects.  At least in my case, I'm trying to get as close as I can to what I saw during the photo shoot and help the portrait result. 

The portrait of Luke was enhanced a bit in therms of its chroma (saturation) as you can see by comparing a normal picture, versus my enhanced sample:

 

I did this based on what I found pleasing to my eyes, but also taking into consideration that I would make a portrait with pastels, which allow for a very intense use of color if one is so inclined.

Tip # 5: Work from life

Nothing replaces the experience that comes from making a portrait from the live model.  My Amsterdam portrait commissions sometimes allow for this and whenever I can, I take full advantage of this.

The live model offers you depth of form, richness of color and a connection to the subject that will show through in the result.  Yes it is more challenging and hard to arrange.  The model has to sit around for quite some time and it's far from the exciting artistic fun that some people have in mind.  But it really is worth it, whether you're a portrait artist or thinking of a portrait commission.

The work of a portrait artist that only works from photos shows something of a superficial understanding of the technique.  It is usually someone who's just copying one to one what he or she sees in the picture.  This results in an unnatural 'airbrushed' feel in black and white:

And a sort of fake tan combined with flour spots when working in color:

As I've said in previous posts, these are clear examples of bad handling of values and color temperature that come from thinking that in copying a photo you can make a good portrait.

See here two examples of the opposite result, when the artist (in this case yours trully) knows what they're doing:

So this covers some of the process that I use for my portrait commissions in Amsterdam.  I will be following up with a post about handing flesh tones which is usually a challenging subject for beginning artists.

Drawing Lessons in Amsterdam, Museums and Art Heroes

During my drawing lessons in Amsterdam, I've tried to always asks students to visit museums on a regular basis and find art heroes that inspire them.

As a case in point, I recently got back from a short trip to South Carolina and I found a new art hero that I knew little about.  It was a large painting exhibition of Robert Henri, an American realist who worked mainly in portraiture and traveled through Europe, creating portraits of characters he considered interesting.  The exhibition was in the Jepson Museum of Savannah, and focused on the paintings and drawings that Henri created during his time in Spain.

Little did I know I was in for an unexpected treat.  Henri turned out to be a portrait artist in the stature, and in fact very close in style to John Singer Sargent.  Bravura brushwork on the garments combined with impeccable drawing skills, and spectacular treatment of each character.  Many of his pieces were surprising in how much he captured the sitter without having to ad much rendition to the features in the face.  A few correctly placed brushstrokes did the whole trick.  It was probably the first time I saw such simplicity and excellence at the same time.

This is something I try to emphasize during my drawing lessons in Amsterdam.  Not so much the simplicity and excellent part (well, that too) but the idea of visiting museums and having art heroes.  Art heroes are usually the way many of us get started into the artistic adventure in the first place.  We see a relative, a friend or a famous artist and their work makes us want to give it a try.

Funny enough, once we start, we sometimes try to wing it on our own so as not to have our style cramped.  There is this myth going around that copying, imitating and emulating are wrong when trying to draw and paing.

If we compared this to learning how to write a novel, it would be the equivalent to try to saying you can become a great novelist without reading and studying Shakespeare and Cervantes.  You would be likely to write something terrible and worst and peculiar at best.  If you were very very lucky, you would write something good, but that would be your worse scenario, because you would be at a loss to tell what it was that made it good.

Studying our art heroes inspire us to reach the level they reached.  Their handling of drawing, color, composition, brushwork.  These are people who have spent a lifetime solving previously unsolved artistic problems, and all we have to do is look at their work to learn how.  No point facing the vast artistic world on our own and trying to re-invent the wheel.

The second thing that we get from studying great painters, is to create depth and breadth to our knowledge and taste.  In his book 'Steal like an Artist', Austin Kleon suggests that the process of becoming creative is in fact a process of selecting from a large and excellent number of things we like and then create based on that mix while adding our own interpretation.  In that sense, no painting is ever totally original, even if the creator thinks so.

Incidentally, visiting museums and seeing amazing works is not even a chore.  If you are really interested in learning art, and you love art, this would be the best part of your day.  What is a bit more difficult is to learn to analyze what is that makes a work good. To learn and describe it in the terms of the visual language and to decide for yourself what drawings or paintings seem interesting to you and which you will choose to "ignore" regardless whether they are nice or not.

Know the greats, study them deeply.  If there is no technical manual of how they did things, create your own, find the largest .jpg image or poster you can get of their work and analyze it, copy it and describe it in detail. 

You will learn greatly from it!

Painting Lessons Amsterdam, why drawing comes first

During my painting lessons in Amsterdam, I take an approach that may be a bit longer, but more sure-footed than that of others.

Most of the time when we go to painting classes in Amsterdam or elsewhere, we expect to be given a canvas, a bunch of oil paint or acrylics, a few brushes and to start merrily painting away at some flowers, or a photograph of our choice.  I have seen it time and again, and I have even fallen pray to such courses.  There's nothing wrong or evil about this, but to the more serious student, or someone who is aiming high, going this route is full of disappointment.

If I would compare this approach of painting lessons, to learning to play the guitar, I would say this is 'playing by ear'.  You're able to play songs you hear on the radio, as long as they're not too complex, and perhaps make some simple songs of your own.  However, your style is likely to lack the clean characteristics of a learned musician.  In their playing you can distinguish the knowledge of the instrument, and in the songs they make, you will recognize deep knowledge of tone, theory and harmony.

Playing by ear, is easier, often nicer and more relaxed.  It never gave anyone a headache, and it will actually make you progress quicker at first.  But in my opinion it handicaps you ever after, as I can attest by my mediocre guitar playing skills.

If we go back to the painting lessons, a more structured and academic approach, is to learn drawing first.  This is to a musician like learning the scales, and becoming good at going up and down the instrument without making a blunder. 

Learning to draw before you embark on a full on painting education works on many levels.  First you get to master form and proportion, without which you will struggle endlessly in your painting attempts.  Secondly you get to learn how to turn form with the use of value (tones).  You will also learn to achieve a good use of edges, which is usually underrated, and most importantly, you will start to develop an understanding of composition, and how to use it to create a visual hierarchy in your work.

While all these points can be learned while painting, it proves a bit too much to handle if on top of that list, you have to deal with color mixing, chroma, hue, color temperature, color harmony and manipulation of the medium on the canvas.  With these many plates in the air, one is likely to fall, and it usually is the most basic one: form.

Therefore, during my Amsterdam painting lessons, we don't start by painting, we start with drawing.  The student needs to be comfortable being able to render any image with a pencil, convey it's proportions, turn form using values, achieve a mood or light situation, depict surfaces and do it all to a high degree of quality.

This is not to say that once you've done this, it will be smooth sailing as you start to paint, but it means you will be able to see if something is wrong, and correct it before you carry on forward, which is the sign of a good artist.

As you progress from drawing to painting lessons, you will have to unlearn some of the things you took for granted.  Your approach will have to be almost completely tonal, and you will be able to turn form without having to change values, by using only color temperature.  This will confuse the hell out of you at first and some artists choose not to do it, and to stick to the dramatic approach.  However, the really good ones learn that conservation of values has a real impact on the quality of their work, and will push this when possible.

So the main point of today's entry, is that your drawing skills are the foundation of your artistic education, fail to take this seriously and your painting skills will miss the key element!

Drawing Classes Amsterdam, My 2 cents on Malevich

As part of my drawing classes in Amsterdam, I offer guided visits to museums in order to develop a good eye for how the masters achieved their impressive results.  These visits are not historical, but purely analytical.

My last visit consisted on attending the Kazimir Malevich exhibition on the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.  It claims to be the largest collection of the artist ever assembled and judging by the number of works on display, I'm inclined to believe them.

I still have mixed feelings about this art exhibition as it seems to me Malevich navigated a fine line between being a genius and a fraud.  On the one hand he was able to produce exquisite drawings and paintings, the degree of finish of all his work was impeccable and it is obvious he invested an immense deal of time and energy in his life, exploring art and his concepts and ideas about it.  He was in other words honestly and highly dedicated to his craft, and not just some nutter making weird stuff.

Thus far so good.  So where does it go wrong for me? 

Perhaps it's in putting too much value on the ideas at the expense of the art itself.  All the isms that he came up with are interesting concepts, but the art they inspired was rarefied and distant.  Of course, a modern art curator would take those words and at the flip of a hat, give them a spin and turn them into what makes his paintings brilliant, but I'm not convinced.  Malevich started by heavily imitating Gaugin and Cezanne, and then went off into some tangent, from which only a Russian government prohibition on abstract art brought him back.

It is of course impossible to take art out of its historical context, so I would never venture saying that for a painting to be good, it would have to fend for itself anywhere and at any moment.  I do believe though, that a painting should fend for itself regardless of who made it.  Otherwise, we're appealing to authority, and making the piece itself second in line.

What I mean to say is that if Malevich's black square is so brilliant, it should be hailed as such regardless of whether he made it, or someone else did.  Ironically my point was proven in the same exhibition, where some lesser artist also produced a black square, except nobody talked about this one.  That sounds to me more like religion than being objective about whether the work is good or not.

The situation reminds me of the movie Vanilla Sky, where Tom Cruise plays a millionaire playboy who's face is disfigured.  Since surgery was not possible he is offered the most advanced facial prostetic in the market, which adapts to his features, allows the skin underneath to heal better, and has plenty of other advantages.

In a fit of irony, Cruise appears impressed and pleased a the suggestion and says he's grateful that they tell him all about these features and benefits, because otherwise he would have thought they were trying to make him wear a f@#!ng mask! 

Well, I feel the same about a lot of Malevich's work.  It requires so much explanation, so many isms and conceptual framework, that it makes me wonder if we're not just being offered a bloody black square. Once again I don't question his dedication and honest pursuit of pushing the boundaries of art, but what resulted may not look outstanding, which is to me THE test of a visual piece.

Some of his work, and that of his followers is worthy of a 3 year old.  However, if modern art has shown us something is that adults making 3 year old worthy art can come up with really good concepts and excuses to justify it.

My 2 cents...

Drawing Classes in Amsterdam, the danger of dogmatic approaches to art

During my Amsterdam drawing classes I try to convey the classical approach to learning art as a near surefire method of learning the principles of the visual language.  This is not to be confused with saying it is "the best way to make art" or even a guarantee that the art you produce when learning to draw with the old master's approach will be beautiful or compelling.

My point to this blog entry is to express my reluctance to believe in, and point out the pitfalls of certain assumptions or dogmatic views that certain teachers hold, or that the public has about making art.

When teaching a method of drawing, no matter how good, a proper teacher will tell you the downsides of this method, and must stress the fact that this is not the only way to do things. 


Dogma 1:  There is one best method of drawing

If we take the academic drawing method, it is very slow, focused on accuracy and precision and follows certain learning and execution steps which are well known.  When drawing fast poses and quick gesture sketches, this approach is not practical, but in other circumstances it can create amazing results.

Take on the other hand the quick sketch illustrative approach.  This creates beautiful flowing lines and plenty of expression, but the detail may be missing and accuracy is often sacrificed for the sake of a more organic and spontaneous result.

It is nonsense to say either approach to drawing is "better" than the other one. Each approach has it's place in art and you can choose to use them depending on the situation, the result you are looking for and the one you find more enjoyable.


Dogma 2:  Painting and drawing must be kept separate

This one is a very damaging dogma that some art teachers spread and which make some practitioners struggle unnecessarily with their art.  The dogma says that when painting, lines and drawing are not to be used.  Painting must be done on a tone and mass kind of way and problems with proportions, alignment and form must be sorted out in the thick of things.

The problem with this, is that if the artist's drawing skills are weak, those problems can never be sorted out. It becomes an endless, frustrating struggle that produces nothing but weak results.

The basis for painting is drawing.  No question about it.  You can then use these drawing skills to make markers or drawings with your brush, or even with charcoal before starting to paint. 

Some academic artists take this one step further by creating a full drawing study and then transfering it to the canvas so that they separate the drawing from the painting.  Having tried this, it does feel a bit like painting by numbers, but with experience, the result can be made to look as natural and beautiful as any painting made in a  tonal manner.

Dogma 3:  Fresh art must be made in a careless way

This is one poorly conceived idea that I try to discredit as soon as possible in my Amsterdam drawing classes.  The thinking is that to obtain results that appear loose and fresh, the piece must be created with a careless approach.

The reality is that to create a beautiful work of art, the artist must become a kind of criminal mastermind, plotting and scheming about composition, light color harmony and also brushwork and edges.  These last two being largely responsible for the feeling of spontaneity in a finished piece.

Remember that loose results can only be good if they are deliberate. If you try to create art by acting carelessly and hoping it will come out right, you are stacking the odds badly against yourself.


Dogma 3:  Good original art cannot look like any other before it

This is the kind of idea that has aspiring artists creating the most weird and peculiar things and more often than not, failing to strike a successful formula for aesthetic results.  The reason is simple, it is easier to stand on the shoulders of giants and learn about principles that worked well for artists in the past. 

No aspiring novelists sets out to write their work by first re-inventing language or trying to completely rework the structure of what a novel is.  The possibilities are so endless within the given framework that we can benefit from exploring those before veering off in some awkward tangent.

This is not to say that pushing for originality is a bad thing, but we humans are original even when we're not trying.  When you learn to draw and practice by making master copies, the impulse to make changes is almost unavoidable.  In the end the fear of being like a parrot that only replicates the work of others gets in the way of learning the principles of art in order to make more educated choices on your own work.

Dogma 4:  Art that is well executed is boring

This one is probably the worse art calumny that has been spread after the impressionists.  These guys departed from the strict salon style looking to find true effects of light, which could only be captured in very short periods of time and outdoors.  This meant drawing had to be sacrificed in favor of speed and color accuracy.

Unfortunately, the lesson taken from this was that something drawn and executed with exquisite finish was boring and not progressive enough, and ever since then, artists have tried to get away with ever diminishing levels of craftsmanship.

It's interesting, but painting seems to be the only art where something poorly made can still be called good.  Fair to say that some cubist and postmodern works are good.  They have interesting compositions, strong use of color and line, but a lot of them are total crap and we should be able to say that a specific Picasso or Mondrian is total crap.

When we hear a song in the radio that is poorly plaid or just bad, we call it bad no matter who it's from.

Hope this gives you some ideas of what to look out for.  Don't be afraid to learn properly, and don't think that one single approach is the best one no matter how famous the teacher that conveys it!

Drawing classes Amsterdam, the Loomis Method

In my Amsterdam drawing classes I offer the possibility to learn creating portraits either from photos or from the live model.

Learning to draw from the live model is a demanding discipline, so it is perhaps a good idea to start by learning to draw faces from photos on the internet, since you can choose the level of difficulty and type of face, as well as enjoying a model that you can summon whenever you feel like and always stands still.

One of the cited methods to learning to draw the portrait is the Loomis Method.  Andrew Loomis was an illustrator who could create faces and characters from his imagination thanks to the deep knowledge he had from the human skull and anatomy.

To illustrate the power of a method and knowledge of a subject, here are two portraits that I have created.  This first one was created through pure practice and honing my powers of observation:

This was drawn from the live model during 3 sessions and it's a work of pencil on paper.  As you can see, there is plenty of detail on this drawing, all the parts of the face seem to be in the right place, and there is knowledge of using the gray scale, called values, to achieve a sense of volume.  However, from an academic perspective this is a fairly weak drawing as I will explain by pointing to the strengths of this next example.

This was done using academic knowledge and the Loomis Method:

You will argue the differences are small, but then again learning to draw is learning to understand the power that small details have on the whole.  Notice the stronger knowledge of anatomy, which becomes apparent on the structure of the eyes, nose and lips.  The skull structure is also well understood, which allows the values to more clearly show the different planes of the head.  This all sounds almost too technical, but it gives the drawing a certain clarity of thought that the smooth and mooshy result of the previous one does not achieve.

Having a method and learning it through drawing classes also allows you to start doing the 'mechanical' part of the drawing in a more sure-footed way, and in turn focusing more of your attention on compositional touches and fancier expression.  Notice the play of edges on the hair, which are sometimes diffuse and sometimes very hard or broken.

When learning to draw with a particular method, be aware that some of your first results will be even worse than the drawings you normally produce.  This is OK, you're taking a step back in order to absorb the new method. Sometimes this feels terrible and its frustrating, because your eye is ahead of what your hands can do, and it's telling you the results are no good. 

In this particular example, the first drawing though week bears a closer resemblance to the model, while in the second one, a good piece of art has been created, but resemblance has suffered, though not dramatically.

The Loomis Method focuses on thinking of the entire skull as a structure in space, with a very specific shape, which once grasped allows you to place the features in the correct position.  This method proves something rather counter-intuitive for beginning artists, which is that the individual features can never help enhance resemblance when the correct structure of the skull has not been assessed correctly.

Stick with it and you will get there with method, practice and discipline.  During my Amsterdam drawing classes I encourage students to only draw at a speed at which they can be accurate and not a second faster. Only frustration will come from rushing in and building on top of a shaky foundation.


Good luck!

Drawing Classes in Amsterdam, the portrait

During my drawing classes in Amsterdam, I give students the option to learn to create portraits.  This is usually an important segment of a drawing lessons program and must be covered fairly extensively.

A good portrait consists of many layers of knowledge which come together to create great resemblance as well as a good piece of art.

As with everything else, good drawing is the basis, and once this is established, and a strong composition is found, the chances of a successful piece are greatly enhanced.  Amsterdam offers a great option of small ateliers which bring live models in, for art students, professionals and hobbyists alike to draw and paint any way they like.

For aspiring artists who want to learn to draw the portrait, this should be a regular part of their artistic practice.  However, lots of practice and a 'feel' for how to capture someone's likeness can never compete with strong knowledge of the anatomy of the skull, and a solid method of how to capture it.  This is something I strongly emphasize during my Amsterdam drawing lessons.

The reason is simple.  If you look at portraits made by amateurs, and even by the masters of the 17th century, you usually find that the face looks round and smooth.  While this was highly appreciated back in those days, and will make you feel like you can draw a portrait, we have since then, found out that as it happens, it is better to draw certain areas as flat.  A combination of roundness and angular sections makes for a far stronger statement on learning to draw a portrait.

During drawing classes, the only way to achieve such a result, is to have clear and solid knowledge of the planes of the head.  This brings excellence of drawing and clarity of structure to the head you're drawing.  You're no longer drawing the outline of a head and putting the features in it.  You are instead drawing the volume of a skull, with its particular structure, and once you've captured it, the features fall into place almost automatically.

This is an approach that John Singer Sargent, the great master advocated, and which only started to make sense to me once I learned that, when drawing a portrait, you must assess the underlying structure in order to succeed.  Features move and change, but the skull remains exactly the same, and this is what you're after.

During my Amsterdam drawing lessons I make use of great tools such as the Loomis method in order to bring structure to this understanding.

So in conclusion, lots of practice is very necessary to be a good portrait artist, but all the practice in the world will not get you to the peak of your abilities if it's not founded on sound knowledge.

Better to put in the practice hours while you are solidly informed of what you're doing than to blindly try to strike luck. Not doing this, you will risk being someone who after many years of attempting portraits, still runs into simple mistakes of alignment and proportion, and who's lukewarm art is surpassed by the crisp and beautiful art of a knowledgeable counterpart.