John Singer Sargent Drawing Techniques

Welcome to Wardell's Art Tutorial. Today I'm going to talk about John Singer Sargent. He's an artist who was born in 1856 and died in 1925. Even though he's American he was born in Florence and he grew up in Europe where his parents lived. He did not come to the United States until later in his life and spent most of his life in the United States in the last 20 years of his life. So he was around all the culture and the artists and impressionists and all the big things happening in Europe in those days. You could say that he was born in the right place at the right time for being an artist. He painted over 900 oil paintings, 2,000 watercolors, and many sketches and charcoal drawings. He traveled throughout France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland while he was still a child and his mother would encourage him to sketch and to do watercolors because she was an amateur who painted watercolors. So she would encourage him and his sister. So he had the right background and if you wanted to be an artist and you had that background and all, that gets you pretty far really fast. If you're like me or a lot of other artists who was not born in that culture, it makes it more difficult to reach the level that John Secret Sargent had reached because the opportunities he had at his disposal. We have you two today, which really helps, but you cannot replace being in the actual museums or being taught by the actual masters and artists of those days. They cannot be replaced. So his first teacher was a French portraitist by the name of Corollas Duran. He's a famous artist and so he had initially influence on him. So we're going to go over some of his drawings here and see what we can learn from them. You turn on the light right here. The first book we're going to look at is Sargent's Portrait Drawing, 42 works by John Singer Sargent. Now I'm left-handed and Sargent's right-handed. So I have to switch my pencil to the right hand to show you how he got some of these effects. Now the silhouette of this woman here and this he was drawing a sketch here. You can see here the economy of means is what he did here. The line starts out very light here and then it starts out light here and then it's darker here and it comes down this way and it comes darker here, darker here, lighter, darker, lighter, like this. And the hair is kind of just drawn in. The ears, it's just placed in its place. The ear canal, first he was going to have it here and then he decided to change it and he put it here. So he's just like noodling along here, you know, trying to figure out where he's going to go with this. Now to give you an example of drawings, I mean lines like this here, you can take your pencil like this here and go like this or you can go like this, you know, where I'm burying the lines and kind of just like sweeping over it. So that gives you, you know, some hint about, you know, how you go about drawing. And I'll go over more of this in other lessons, you know, how you can draw like this. But the thing about it is it has variation in lines as he has here. Now this here was a sketch. This here part right here, he took some time to sketch to get the proportions correct. The rest of it, you know, he sketched rather loosely and fast. Kind of went like this here with his pencil like this. And right here, it's really loose right here, these lines here. And the proportion of the face, you go by the classic proportion of the face where the nose is from the middle of the eyebrows to the bottom of the nose, bottom of the nose to the chin. And from there, you go from the eyebrows to here and that tells you where the top of the head is right here. You can also find where the oval shape of the face here or the head and you can find out what the middle is because the eyes is in it and an adult is in the middle of the face. So if I went from here to here, that would be from here to here, that would also be the top of the head here. Also, when you look at eyes, usually, I mean, this is the ideal conditions, they could be slightly more or less. But you go, here's the eye right here. And this is between the eyes, it's the same as the length of the eyes from here to here like this. So those are some of the ways you can get your coordinates right. And that'll be a starting point for you. The bottom of the nose is the same as the bottom of the earlobe. Eyebrows at the top of the ears. Here's under plane of the nose itself right here. And you kind of sketch this out. And they put the eye sockets in here and so that the eyes themselves fit inside the eye sockets. And they drew a line here, which is not there in life, but it points out that this here is set in. And so then, you know, you darken this right here and right here and show that it was setting in with the shadows. This is where when you're doing all this and you get this right. And then here, you can start having fun here when you do the blouse. I'll draw this really fast here. And you just look at it using the right side of your brain. And you kind of go like this and you look at it. Boom, boom, boom. And you draw. So that's that's one way of doing it. This is another fast sketch. This here, you know, you kind of like a pencil like this here, held it like this here and drew like this, you know, very rapidly. You see how he drew here and then he changed his mind. So this is the line he wants. This is not the line he wants. So he goes drew a little bit darker here like this. But yeah, I like that. So he he started he got tired of painting portraits and all for the society. So he started doing them in charcoal and he get a pretty good price for them, even if they were in charcoal. So he started on that avenue later in his life. If you look at some of these, like these charcoal drawings here, back in his days, they did not have needed erasers. What he would use was fresh bread and he like kneaded in his hands. And once he had in there, this here is all in charcoal here. And then he would take the kneaded bread and you wipe it here, wipe charcoal off here, here, here, and like that. And he'd pick out these highlights. This would be all dark and he'd go like this here and lift off the charcoal. So that's one of the techniques that you can use in your drawings. Or if you're not an artist and you just want to look at when you look in museums or whatever, you can understand, you can read the drawing and see how the artist came with these effects and everything. I mean, you can look at the lines in there and know more, read the drawing better. Let's see, moving along here, let's see something. He started, well, his background is going up and down, up and down, up and down. You'll find that over and over and over a lot of his portraits. For some reason, he likes going up and down. I guess that, you know, the head is vertical, so he's going to make the background vertical, vertical, vertical. Here in this drawing here, you see the cellular of the face here. And he didn't draw the side of the face because it's easy to draw, which it is easy to draw. He just drew it because he thought that it showed better the features of the setter. So, for example, in this drawing here, he probably liked the fine little hump underneath the nose, over the nose, which just goes like this here and then swoops over here to the tip of the nose like this. Also, you can see here where he starts, this is a dark line here, and it comes down and swoops over here. And then this part, there's no line, it's just the background, just the background showing the lines, where the lines, and then the lines takes up again and comes dark over here again. Then once you get all this here and here, and he's shading like this here, then you can kind of go like over here, you can start having fun over here, you can sweep over here, sweep over here, and you look at the setter and you sweep this way, you know, you sweep this way, you know, you're just kind of like just wrapping this thing up. And then after he shaded all this, he takes his bread, kneaded his bread, and he comes over here and goes like this and this and swivel it right here and right here. I mean, that's the fun part. When you get to that part of the drawing, when you know that it's successful and everything, then you can kind of like play with it. So this here is in 1916, this one here was made. Another one, let me see here, I can show you some more of these later on, but in this drawing here, you can see here, he drew this really rapidly in pencil. He's going like this here. A lot of times you can tell whether an artist is left-handed or right-handed. Ninety percent of the people are right-handed, of course. I'm left-handed, so if I did this, I'd be going in this direction. He's right-handed, so he's going this direction. So a lot of times you can read a drawing and see whether the artist was left-handed or right-handed by if the lines go from the right to left, and then it's going to be a right-hand drawing. If it goes from, if it goes like here from left to right, then most likely the artist is left-handed. So anyway, everything's in the same direction here, and all he's doing is he's drawing here, and there's going more light here, darker here, and then he's coming over here and drawing this in here, and these lines over here. So this is a very rapid drawing, and he drew a circle right here. He wanted to make it in confines of the circle here for his composition. For the next book here is a John Seeger Sargent, Portraits in Charcoal. These are the ones that he, I mean, or drew for society where he was, when he got tired of doing so many oil paintings. This is his self-portrait, painted in 1906, when he was in the height of his powers as an artist, and it's got some of the Impressionists in here influence. It's also got Monet, a lot of this is Monet, and also Velázquez, a Spanish artist, which is influenced on a lot of artists even to today, and it's Economy and Means right here, but in another lesson, we'll get into that. So we've got some of these right here. This here is his studio, and this is interesting because this would be facing the north, and there's north light coming through this way, and he can control the light by the curtains over here, and this would be his easel sitting up right here, and that's where he'd be sitting here. If he had a model, say, sitting on this couch over here, he'd have it turning this way and facing this way, and also some guests could sit here too, but this is an ideal studio. You know, not everybody has an ideal studio. I mean, where you got this high window up here, you got the light coming in, I mean, you know, you make it a lot easier because drawing in art is not easy. The more you can do, you know, to help you along, the better it is. This here is a pose. While he's drawing, he's just posing here, and he's being very still because this was in 1903, so he had to be still for this. You can see everything's been sharpened and everything, so this is like a publicity photograph. This here is, he is actually drawing here, you know, because you can see he's out of focus. He's actually looking at the model here, and he's doing it vertically like this here, so this is probably a really a snapshot taken in the 1920s, and he's drawing probably very rapidly, and notice how he's holding his pencil. He's holding it, he's holding his pencil like this, you know, he's going like this, so there's different ways to hold your pencil, depending on what you're trying to achieve. Let's see over here. This here drawing is very rapid, and this is what I call drawing on the right side of your brain, where you're just looking at a subject you're drawing, and you don't give yourself time to think, and that way you can draw very rapidly, and I'll show you that in another lesson, how you do that, but he drew this very rapidly, and you can see there's a lost edge here and a lost edge here, and there's a lot of economy of means here, where he's just, he doesn't, he's not striving for accuracy. He's just trying to catch the moment at the time, so he has to draw very rapidly. He's got a globe back here, where he just outlines it, and there he's like drawing this way, and drawing this way, and come this way, so, and just kind of, I'm making sound effects here, but yeah, that's what I think a lot of times, but here's a hard line here, but there's a different, different types of lines here, also found lines, and sometimes this is really fun to sketch this way. There's one drawing here. Okay, this right, this drawing here, again, he's drawing, he's going like this here, the side of the chakra, this way, but what's interesting about this, about this sketch here is, I don't know if you can see it, there's a white line here, and how you get that white line, you take a stylus, and you dig into the paper with a stylus, and you draw the line to the shoulder this way, and that way, when you take the charcoal, or the pencil over it, go like this here, and it leaves that white line there. That's another technique. I'll show you how to do that sometime, but that leaves that line there, so that's what he did here to get that effect. Notice that there's no details in this. The lines are not, I mean, the eyes are not detailed, the mouth is not detailed, but your mind is what, is what's putting all this details into the, into the drawing. It's like you're, you're dancing with the drawing, or you're cooperating with the drawing. Your mind subconsciously is in the drawing itself. It makes it a lot more fascinating. If you look over here, he has a hard line here, and here, and a sweep here, and a sweep here, and, and, and after he drew all this, it's when he puts these hard lines in there. Yeah, I want to emphasize this, emphasize this, emphasize this, this, this, you know, and then he kind of swirls over this way, and it's just another, you know, technique, or something, you know, just to have fun, you know, fun with a pencil and all, but it's just marvelous to see something like that. This is a good, a good drawing here. Here you have a hard line here, and then it becomes softer here, but it becomes really soft here where the shadow is coming through this, this way, and then over here, this is, you can see how this is just like a sketch very rapidly, you know, there's no details. The details is in the face itself, not in the hair, not anywhere else. The most important thing is the eyes, and then the lips, and then the nose, but the rest of it is kind of like a more or less sketched out even. You don't see any hair strands, individual strands, it's just all masked in. Okay, I want to go back to this book here and show a sketch or portrait that Sargent did. First of all, the background was this charcoal all in here, and all this, it was charcoal here, and then he took his kneaded bread, and there's a good sample how he did this. He just wiped it out this way, this way, the folds of it like that, and then he also did here, and then after this right here, they get this effect, this, the softness right here, see the softness. He took his bread, and nowadays we use kneaded eraser, of course, and he just kind of like, just picked up one like, like that, you know, to get, to get this effect right here, because you can see some of the charcoal still left back here, and then the paper right here, and then you take his eraser like this here, and then you make a sharp edge right here, and that's how you got that effect right there. Now, one last thing I want to show you, this last drawing here, it's this drawing here, and I printed this out, and then again, you can see the background up and down, up and down, up and down, and when you look at this, this, this drawing, you can see that she's a lady who has blonde hair, she has very, you know, like, you know, blue eyes, or hazel eyes, but they're very light, they're not brown, so you can see that by the shading in there, you can see that she's also blonde by, you cannot see any eyelashes at all, you know, you see a lot of amateurs up eyelashes, and they're like this here, you don't need that, but I'll tell you right away, you know, that you are an amateur, and you have not advanced enough to understand what the human eye is really registering, when you look at somebody, you're not looking at each little eyelash, so all you did was just put a line right here, eyelash, here, eyelash, upper lid right here, and there's a pupil right here, and another thing I want to point out about this here is, a lot of times, Sargent, he would not draw like curves, he would draw in straight lines, and that's a good technique to use if you see a curve, or a difficult curve, or something, so his forehead here, he drew here, and here, he's kind of like changing his mind, right, right here, so a straight line here, straight line here, straight line here, here, then here, he went down this way, from here to here, and then he went from here, to slightly curved here, and then here, so these are hard edges, but they're straight lines, and then right over here, it's just shadows over here, if I can hold on to this pencil, shadows over here, and you kind of, you know, like this, and this is where he has fun with the charcoal, you know, just drawing this in, because the face has to be, you know, perfect, has to act like the person, if there's something out of the face, if one eye is slightly above than the other one, or the nose is askew, or anything, the human eye will be able to see that, but whenever you're drawing clothes, it doesn't make any difference, you can just have fun with it, draw it here, so what if this was a little bit this way, or this way, it doesn't make any difference, because clothes flop around anyway, they're not proportioned, or staying in the right place, so he drew this here, and he drew these lines here, and he's doing a sweeping motion here, and look at the necklace she has on, your eyes are saying this is a necklace, but all he did was just lines, he's just spacing these lines, equal space around here, and you register that in your brain, as a necklace, and you see a lot more detail than what he's putting in there, now, whenever you look at some of these drawings, and you see some of these drawings, you can actually, you know, if you see some particular characteristic, or something that you like, for example, in this right here, let's say you're looking at his mouth, and you go, well, how did he do this mouth, I mean, wow, that looks really great, so you know, just kind of sketch it a little bit, now, so you do the easy part here first, you know that it goes like this, and then you know that it's going to sweep down like this, so I'm just kind of like just flying over it, now, you know that this, since this is three quarters, this side of the mouth is not going to be as long as this side of the mouth, because we've got perspective here, so kind of like sweep it here like that, now, and then it kind of comes up a little bit like this here, and it kind of dips down a little bit, okay, now, what you got to do now is you take the side of your pencil, and you kind of like sketch it in like this here, so you're making the edges with your pencil like this, now, you delineate where the mouth is right here, then you come down here, the bottom here, I'm just using the side of the pencil right here, I'm kind of like looking, I'm trying to make this, make this stay soft, make soft edges, then you come back here, you'll get this side of the lips where it turns under, now, this right here is just whisper, pencil right here like this, and this side over here, same, just whisper of it, and then the only sharp marks he does is kind of like that, and then he does it over here, and over here like this, and then underneath here, it's a little bit darker, and then he keeps all this here very soft, a little bit darker over this way, and come over here, make it a little bit darker over here, okay, come back here and clean up some of the sides right here, and I'm going to take this here, because this here is too dark like this, so you can, again, you can use your eraser, like you can lift off, not really smearing it, but you can see that, you know, there's very little actual lines in here, it's just mostly like just shading, and over here, which is important, this kind of comes in like, like that, so it kind of like rolls out like, like this, now, this is, this is so delicate right, right here that, so this is how you would draw this, like, like this, so I hope you learned a little bit something today, and I'll talk with you later, bye.