If you find my content useful and want to show your gratitude you can support my work by donating here: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=G857W24BU5P2J Would you like to improve your paintings or just simply get a glimps into the process of recreating old master works? It's been a centuries old tradition for art students to copy “old master paintings” to learn, and to improve their own work. In “Decoding the Masters” I will copy a selection of old master paintings step by step and you are invited to watch as each piece unfolds. My name is Viktoria Majestic I'm an award winning fine artist and art instructor. The focus won't be on recreating an exact museum replica, rather on learning how each artist solved the problem of translating their subject onto the canvas, including sketching, color mixing, and simplifying.
Copyrights: Copying paintings is legal, so long as the original work is in the public domain (meaning that the copyright on that work has expired). Join me, and enjoy watching the process!
In this video I demonstrate the steps for Isaac Levitan's evening at the Volga painting.
Hello, welcome to another episode of Decoding the Masters,
where each week I recreate an old master painting
step by step in order to help you to improve your art
and help you to understand the secrets of the old masters.
I would like to talk about some of the materials
and supplies that I'm using.
So my paint colors are the following,
titanium white, cadmium yellow light,
cadmium orange, cadmium red light,
alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue, ivory black.
So these are the ones that I use most of the time.
And then there are a few additional colors
that I use occasionally.
So one of them is cerulean blue,
the other one is phthalo green,
and the last one is permanent rose.
Also, you can see some grays here and whites.
So the white again is titanium white,
and these are the mixtures that I will be using
for the value studies,
which I will start each painting with.
As far as the brand goes,
I always recommend professional grade paints
and professional brands.
And some of those are that I recommend.
The one is Charvin, the other one is M. Graham,
and Gamblin.
They all excellent quality paints to work with.
Brushes that I generally use
are Robert Simmons brand,
and the series is Signet.
Sizes were usually between size 12
all the way down to size two.
Of course, you could use other brand brushes and paints.
These are just the ones I'm using.
If you are even decide to attempt to follow along
or try on your own to do some master copies.
So the next painting that I'm trying to decode
is Isaac Levitin's Evening at the Volga.
And I will start again with a value study
to try to better understand not only the values,
but the composition as well.
So the composition in this painting
appears to be very much a diagonal composition.
And I will try to follow that.
I'm just marking my canvas here.
That's always a little bit of a help
when we first try to create a layout,
a composition for the painting.
I will start the color mixtures with the darkest dark
as usually.
And I'm using Alizarin Crimson, Ultramarine Blue,
a little bit of Cad Orange,
a little bit of a gray.
And a little bit of brown.
For the next dark,
I'm going to use again two base colors,
but I will increase the lighter gray in the mixture.
And I'm adding some Cad Red Light.
Cadmium Yellow to gray it a little bit.
There is also a little bit of green.
I'm starting with a rough sketch
and marking my pathway points on the canvas
for reference.
I'm using a Payne's Gray to create the sketch.
♪♪♪
As always, I encourage you to give it a try
and create a master copy yourself.
I hope you enjoyed this episode.
See you next week.
Happy painting.
