Video

best guide online

Nice Ty 🎉

Ok so this was cool 100 years ago when there were no cameras but just like cds and dvd and movie theaters they are no longer needed and then we have you taking hours to do an average painting and absolutely over explaining it making my ears bleed. Seriously you just spoke every second of the video. Do you you like hearing your voice? Cause I don’t and I’m sure everyone else would agree. Zip it and use a camera put the portrait dream away it’s not your thing

This has been an extremely useful video. I am so glad I found this channel and I like the philosophy of keeping things simple.

🤭😂😂😂 I am a hippy!!! what's the story? I love all nature lovers

You are beyond amazing!

The limited palette works well

Thank you for the excellent lesson. "Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Knight of the Order of Santiago was a Spanish painter, the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV of Spain and Portugal, and of the Spanish Golden Age." (Wikipedia) would have reckoned you were giving away his secrets!

some peoples eyes are crooked......

Un saluto da Sicilia

This is the clearest most helpful lesson ever!! Thank you for your content

Brilliant

You are awesome 👏

You are a great artist because you can analyze every aspect like a scientist and after that everything is easy to copy, not everyone able to do that.👍💯

You're left handed. Also you got a nice voice. Great portrait.

Thank you for these essential aids in making progress in portrait painting. So happy I found this video!

Amazing

Was unreal watching you do this. I would that I could. You are very talented indeed, thanks for sharing your skills and knowledge.😎🇦🇺🦘

I watch your videos on my tv for larger screen.This is so informative and clear instruction.The best I have come across.Thank you

Love this video so helpful and clear instructions and no faffing about.Thank you

Unfortunately I don't have much space for painting & lighting. I usually paint at night. I find "daylight" lamps too cool. I try go for neutral light & a mixture of warm & cool.

Thank you Alex! As always, I learned a great amount from this video. As you imply, taking the mundane and making it beautiful is a valuable skill in itself. All the best!

Wow. That’s. A beautiful painting

This is true creativity, thank you, my teacher 👏🙏

Oh my god, Andrew moved! That isn’t a photograph!!!

6 years of art school and such basic stuff ive been looking for everywhere is here. thank you so much. you have no idea how your videos have impacted me. ill paint again!

One little technical detail, you were scratching out the hairs in beard, with the end of the brush, NOT the back brush. Very enjoyable art video.

must ask do you like van gogh

Thanks for doing this video, it’s good to get a different perspective than just the ‘rule of thirds’ because there are so many fantastic paintings/pictures that don’t subscribe to that formula and yet work well as a composition. As with your other content this is really informative and practical, and is the type of advice which is incredibly helpful for student/developing artists, self included , and thanks again for sharing your experience

Amazing work , and amazingly helpful video on grisaille and monochromatic allaprima. Thx again Alex for you clear and to the point style of narrative.

Hope you got through the pandemic, Alex. Please remember to hold your head straight up as you speak rather than tilting it to your left like that-- it gives me a crick in my neck to see it.

I think the rule of thirds is an approximation of dividing the image by the golden ratio. When your subject isn't thin as a line, it's close enough. How much there actually is behind the golden ratio, you decide.

Thanks, Alex for revealing your points about composition! It is a very important topic that must accompany the entire practice of any artist working in an abstract or representational field. Making white and black thumbnails is fundamental to simplify color information and have access to nonchromatic information: direction, distance, and sense, or dynamics of a static image. There are infinite possibilities for shaping surfaces on a plane and mobile support, but there is only one way to unify them according to the visual attention of the working viewer. Geometric rules of sectioning don't help us make dynamic decisions. We relate our visual and lucrative experience to a special type of topology - based on visual-attentive principles. This is a dynamic-implied topology. His neural support is located at the cortical level (especially V5). This is why composition is so hard to explain because the visual information is highly synthesized and with various cortical distributions. The present theory of Bauhaus solves the dynamic problems of composition by using structural elements. The problem is that Kandinsky suggests them as lucrative and constructive primitives without any attentive resolution in the visual context. Any constructed convex surface or deconstructed portion of a concave surface is an elementary-shaped surface according to his dynamic compositional context. This is not an interpretation. The content of any surface is defined not only by color but also by the dynamic category of his compositional context. I develop this on my site: structuralvisualartresearch. Alex, I hope not to bother with the reference. Your presentations, techniques, and principles are always an inspiration to me.

Beautiful portrait and much helpful instruction. Thank you!!

Looks like you painted a weiner coming out of a paper bag. By my account, that’s not the best composition.

This would've been better over classical music. This guy's voice is like nails on a chalkboard. Great painting

I use oil just because paint is just expensive for me. with oil i can paint more area.

I find the 'sausage' in the brown bag a little confusing. Another object or composition would have prevented that. Do like the use of the paletknife.

Feeling enspired after watching, good job. Gonna set up a still life table of my own

Salamat po

Off to the shops to buy a cabbage

I think it is very helpful to have over-lapping objects to unify a composition.

Very fascinating. It is like tool box that I really want to explore. It amusing me that there is a negative comment. It does not surprise me now! Yeah really exciting stuff that makes me want to paint more and more over to really explore putting things together in ways I find interesting. I am about a year into painting and I am selling portraits here and there but it is exciting to think about how to compose a painting that I want to produce to express something I see and interesting. Again Thank you so much for the work you put into this. Excellent job!

Fantastic, I’m so happy you are here! 😊

This is so very helpful! Thank you!!

This actually made a massive difference in how I paint people, easily the best demo on portrait painting I've ever seen.

Holy shit That's the pallet I use. I thought it was just childish colour preference. I feel a little better about that now

I have a few books on composition. They are all great books, highly rated on art websites, and I enjoy reading them. I struggle to get my head around some of the content though……..until now! That totally made sense to me. Fantastic video👍🏻

Hey, I appreciate the advice you share, and think these points are very much needed to be said. However, I feel like dismissing mathematical structures for composition is a little short sighted, as they are essential in understanding harmonious compositions alongside the factors you mention (color, shapes and shadow). When you’re learning art, it’s most important to understand the rules that dictate what looks pleasing to the eye if you lack the intuitive ability to do so (as is the case with most students), so I would always advice anyone wanting to improve, to look into it. I’m personally not a big fan of the rule of thirds and feel like it is misleading to a lot of people. However, utilizing the golden ratio (as you mention in your video) can be an incredibly helpful tool - though I’d like to mention that its utility goes beyond a certain aspect ratio or simply the use of the spiral. Being able to calculate natural forms by the use of 2 to 3 ratio is a tool you can use in any type of painting/canvas size/design element and is extremely versatile. I’d suggest anyone wanting to learn about harmonious compositions to read Lectures on Art by Alphonse Mucha, as he does a brilliant job explaining and demonstrating the use of this compositional tool. To me, the calculated composition is the basis upon which other design elements can be added. Choosing a color palette and utilizing specific shapes are extremely important as well in creating a good artwork, but for students without having a clear understanding of why, and where to place these elements, the resulting artwork can end up unnecessarily suboptimal.

I think the biggest issue is observation i mean understanding what you see. We all struggle with understanding the light sources' temperature. Thank you.