Painting an Alla Prima Portrait of My Grandmother
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- čas přidán 2. 03. 2018
- In this portrait painting tutorial, realist artist Alex Tzavaras shows you how to paint a portrait using an Alla Prima oil painting technique. In this demonstration, Alex paints his 101 year Grandmother from life, in a single session of 3 hours.
Alex Tzavaras is a contemporary realist artist offering portrait painting and alla prima oil painting tutorials. Alex teaches the traditional painting techniques artists used to draw and paint from life up until the start of the 20th century.
For Alex's course on the fundamentals of oil painting visit:
/ simplifydrawingandpain...
Or connect with Alex:
/ alex_tzavaras
/ simplifydrawingandpain...
/ alextzavaras
alextzavaras.com
wow!101 year old grandma!she looks pretty young!!amazing.,by the way your art is just out of this world.
Thank you! She's 103 now.
SIMPLIFY Drawing & Painting She looks young someone who’s over 100. Also, thanks for this video, it really helps me with my painting.
I love that you just paint. No three-hour drawing before painting, no grid. You just go for it using tried and true techniques for proportion, correcting and reevaluating as you go. Beautiful!
Firstly, adorable grandma.
Secondly, this video has great advice: limiting the initial value range and suggesting rather than drawing in the details. It's so tempting to draw [minor] items like glasses on the face, which becomes overwhelming and obscuring thus leading to a cartoony look.
I've been driven mad in portrait painting by a certain online instructor who recommends painting the dark colours first. The way Mr Tzavaras does it makes so much more sense
Your videos are amazing! The plus I usually get from your videos is that they are short yet filled with so much info. Thanks
Thanks. That's my aim.
@@SIMPLIFYDrawingandPainting yes the shortness is a huge advantage. Oil painting instruction is uniquely overwhelming, and you are the only one who keeps it short
These methods and techniques were nearly lost. How glorious that artist/teachers such as yourself have dug deep and worked passionately with challenging techniques and concepts to revive representational wisdom that took centuries if not millenia for humanity to acquire. Thank you for sharing. You do our species proud! (Grandmother too!)
Thank you very much Gary!
Alex Tzavaras is not only a good artist, but he is also a better teacher.
Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with us.
Thanks your lovely grandma, and your informative lessons.
Great advices! Thank you for sharing.
Awesome. Thanks for the video!
So good!
Really lovely painting !
Beautiful
Great display and your granny looks fantastic! Thanks to the both of you.
Great instructional video. So much explained so simply. Love it!
Just amazing. So glad I found this channel. As a newcomer to painting this is simply wonderful.
Inspiring tutorial! Thanks so much!
Great video Alex. Thanks very much.
Love your videos. Important to teach the traditional way. Thank you for sharing with the world.
I continue to be absolutely fascinated by the way your simple process produces such beautiful , professional results.
Just lovely! I've added this to my 'beautiful art videos' playlist thank you so much!
Thank you
beautiful video thanks for sharing!
Your grandmother is very beautiful.
Thanks for sharing...
and teaching
Alex, you r great!
She seems so nice. Miss my grandma...
Thank you very much!
Very well done tutorial! Your grandmother is quite the trooper
yes she is!
Thanks for sharing this. A lovely process to watch.
...also, this music is great. Where can I find this, please!?
fantastic
Always great to learn from your mastery!! Thank you
Thanks José!
such a simple but beautiful portrait
Thanks!
Thanks Alex. Your videos are always easy to follow and not too long. I enjoyed this thoroughly. For me, as an artist I think I struggle to keep things simple and Hey it's all in your name. Simplify. Simplify. It's such a big key to the end result. Especially if that is your style. Hyperrealism isn't really my thing. I love painterly and I love that gap between illusive realism and just impressions.
excellent video about tonal simplification. Watching several times to glean as much as I can. :) Thanks
Thank you very much. Glad it was helpful!
thanks, your video are really helpfull
You´re amazing!
Wonderful! She is such a sweet subject, and you captured her beautifully. 😊❤
Thank you very much. Her name is also Flora!
I am inspired to pick up the brushes again. Cheers
I love that technique , like you said simple , but also a great classical method . I spend afternoons with you or Caesar Santos or Alpay and paint along trying different techniques. But I really like your method and approach lately because of you teaching skills. I've learned priceless information on the direct method portrait painting , as I've always been an indirect figure painter.
One day I will send you a gift to show my gratitude. Something singular and one of a kind.
Thank u for tutorial sir
Thank u good lesson to learn 🙏🏻
Excellent video! I've seen your other videos. I'm a big fan of Harold Speed too.
Awesome little video, the speed here helps to get a simple overview. Helpful, the three tone approach, I'm struggling currently, I'll try it. Love the stroke economy in your work. Thanks.
Thanks Tod
Awsome!
Thank you
Thank you so much 😊 I’m studying Alla prima/Richard Schmid, And your videos are very useful to me that understand better this book🙏🏻 thanks a lot 🌸
That's really cool. If you've got Alla Prima, then you're definitely on the right track.
Great demo as the others from you. I really learn many tips from your demos. Value shapes and keep them simple. Thanks a million. All the best for you. Greetings from Mexico.
Thank you José.
@@SIMPLIFYDrawingandPainting thank you for all the knowledge and experience you share.
Wonderful
Excellent
already after the first touches of the brush you can immediately see the similarity!
Thank you Christian!
great video!
Great video cheers
It shows your experience so well that even by 0:45, those first rough lines are accurate, and describe her face very well. This might seem easy, but it's really tricky . Awesome painting!
Thank you very much Tamas!
Thanks Alex. this has nailed the process i want to try next. It seems so simple the way you describe it but its hard to find videos which talk about it as well as show it. Some have a 10 value process and that has been overcomplicating things for me (and take me an age to mix). looking fwd to my next attempt now.
Glad you've found this helpful. And good luck with your next attempt.
Really your channel is great!❤🙌
Alex Tzavaras. Alex Tzavaras. Alex Tzavaras. I often look for your vids cos they're so damn good and I love your style but I often end up being presented other peoples videos by the algorithm. I figure if I write your name enough times I'll remember who I'm searching for. Cheers pal. You're a true inspiration.
Thank you very much Anthony! I'm lucky my surname is quite easy to find online.
Well done Grannie :)
Great video, very informative, thanks for posting! I see from a comment below that your grandma didn't like the portrait; not to worry, ...we all do!! ; )
Nice
Sweet Gran xx
Cute grandma
Marvellous Alex. Hope your gran is still keeping you in check! 👍
Thanks! She's still going strong
To summarise, work first with 3 values to get a likeness. Next bring in a 4th value (usually greyish) to merge the joins between shadows and lighter parts. After that look for some variations in the main value colours to finish. I hope I got that right. Great video, thank you.
Pretty much, although there will colour some variation within all of the main values, the shadows, lights, highlights and particularly in that 4th edge value.
Have you seen my video on values? I talk more about simplifying the main values
czcams.com/video/OpDLyGzi9Tk/video.html
Also, on the subject of colour variation, I recently made some videos on colour temperature:
czcams.com/video/Y4yOKITICrc/video.html
czcams.com/video/W2ZZXauy-kU/video.html
This helped my studies by leaps and bounds. Can you do a video on edges?
Sargent style. Con grats
Gosh! Sargent? Too kind
Hi Alex, great videos, great work! If I understand it well, you draw with your brush and 3 values, starting from the inside, with a few preliminary lines. Its facinating, but i think you have to be very good in spacial relationships and drawing freehand to work that way, i think I couldn't do this without a sound drawing. Any advice for me?
Astonishing Alex. Love to have lessons
Thanks. Where are you?
Swansea
UK at least. I just finished teaching a workshop for some people in Lancashire. Best place to see if I'm teaching any courses outside London is probably my fb page facebook.com/simplifydrawingandpainting/
Thanks Alex, I'll take a look
The video: amazingly well done and explained
The background music: boom😉 boom 😗boom 😌boom 😍ba 🥰TICK 😎boom 😩boom🥵
Thank you Taronis!
AWWWW
Where have you been all my life? Your instruction is amazing. I looked up your workshops and I see you're mostly in Europe. I live in S. California. I could not find any dvd's, do you have any? I want to learn how to simplify. Exactly what I'm looking for. I really need a longer instruction and don't know where to get that. You are a genius. Thank you so much for your videos on CZcams.
Thank you so much! I haven't released any DVD's yet. I am planning to shoot a full length portrait demo in realtime later this year. Also thinking of how I could turn my other courses into videos? Did you see my other youtube video on Simplifying values? It goes into slightly more depth about my approach. Hope it's useful czcams.com/video/OpDLyGzi9Tk/video.html
Pleeeeease Release that DVD!!! *tips hat*
Two key takeaways for me today are: 1.) The secret to painting is deciding what to leave out, and, 2.) Keep the details to a minimum. Thank you!
So interesting to watch. Maybe slow it down a little and tuck a pic of your model in an upper corner so we can see what you're seeing. Very impressed with your ability to determine placement of features and still capture the nuanced character of your sitter.
Thanks Emily! If you watch some of my more recent videos, I edit them a little differently and include images of my subjects. Also, if you want to see longer format demos, filmed in real time, they're available on my patreon channel.
I hope you got some cookies after this 😊
100 year grandmother , thanks
Yes, I'm very lucky. She's just turned 105.
@@SIMPLIFYDrawingandPainting Good luck brother, and take care her.
Me: Learn from a professional (SIMPLIFY Drawing and Painting)
Me: HOW CAN I DO THAT HE"S SO PROFESSIONAL!!!!
I love your drawing :D
I couldn't always paint this way. I had to practice. You might like this video I made on how long it took me to make progress:
czcams.com/video/nHI_LmFBVTg/video.html
Is this limited pallet , which colored are used in this video.
Lovely lively demo. Hate the background noise.
Great tutorials. What is the song?
Thanks. It's by my friend, it's unreleased. You can hear some more of his stuff here;
soundcloud.com/leonidas
“You've got to try really hard to resist the temptation of painting too many details and going into details too soon. ”
wish I've heard this a few years earlier.
I reckon, this is probably the most important thing we need to learn about painting. Our brains automatically zone in on details i.e. the separate parts of a scene. And as we focus on each separate part, detail we see. We need to be able to see the whole scene at once and compare the each separate part with the whole. Whether its details, values or colour, everything is relative to everything else in the painting. I cover all of this on my Mass Drawing course. Of course it takes practice, because we're hard wired to focus on the separate parts. I still catch myself doing it. It's like a mindfulness exercise when you keep catching your thoughts drifting off.
@@SIMPLIFYDrawingandPainting Thank you for your enlightening reply! It's not often to hear such strong words in your videos. Glad to catch it this time. It sounds like meditation, more than the painting itself.
your paintings are awesome, i notice that you paint the whole shape of the head, and then place dark tones on top of that half tone mass, whereas many others will paint the light shade, and leave the dark shapes empty, to paint on afterwards. do you ever have trouble with paint being muddied by doing it your way? or is it the intention to kind of mix on the canvas?
Hi Johnny, I made a video on this very subject. Why people paint dark to light and how its possible to paint dark on top of light if you want to:
czcams.com/video/JkI1yTF6DFY/video.html
@@SIMPLIFYDrawingandPainting OMG the very question that has been vexing me for years !!!
Thanks Grandma. o/ Are you going to upload an update to this picture Alex?
I wasn't planning to. What would you like to see?
+simplify , the finished picture.
Do you use different brushes for different colors?
Yes I try to, in order to keep my colours clean. But you don't necessarily need a new brush for each colour, you just need to clean you brush with solvent before mixing each new colour.
It seems that painting is the art of resisting temptations: not to overdraw, not to use too many colors, not to add too many details too early, also not to add too many details at a later phase (keep only the info that is needed)...
Yes definitely! I find the more experience I get, the more I leave out.
Was it meant to be a nod to Whistler? If it was meant to make us smile it worked with me.
Birdy
Short and crisp demo, music distracting though. Thanks for sharing.
Do you use many different brushes?
Yes. Mainly bristles, flats and filberts (the flat ones with rounded ends) and some softer synthetics or badger/sables. I'll do some videos on brushes at some point. It's an important subject. In the meantime a talk a little bit about brushes in this video;
czcams.com/video/Sm9hCGY6k6k/video.html
nanas looking good for her age.
Sir can you mention the colour pallett while doing portrait?
Have you heard of the Zorn palette? Anders Zorn was a Swedish painter around the turn of the last century. If you don't know him, check him out he's amazing! he supposedly used only 4 colours for a lot of his paintings. Titanium white, Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Red light and Ivory Black. Its a very convenient limited palette for mixing flesh colours. because of my Grandmother white hair I pretty much used those four pigments for this painting. Though it would appear I may also have used some Ultramarine Blue for the purple in my Gran's spectacles. Maybe some Alizarin Crimson in the dark of the left eye too.
Thank you
It's wonderful job if the video shows a little bit slower. Thx.
dude wtf, i learnt more in ur 1 video than 2 hours of new masters academy video
Thanks! That's good to know
Grandma on the vocal sample from the 70's.
what is that first layer before sketch?
Do you mean the grey ground before I start drawing? It's a wash with mixture of turpentine and ivory black, wiped back a bit with a paper towel and left to dry for about 10 mins before I start painting. I use it because I don't like painting straight onto a white canvas
@@SIMPLIFYDrawingandPainting Yes, the grey one. Thank you for the perfect answer
how did your gran like her portrait?
She said she looked miserable. She prefers another one I did of her a couple of years earlier. The earlier one is better, I spent a bit longer on it.
@@SIMPLIFYDrawingandPainting Too funny! We all liked it, anyway!!
Boom boom boom boom
Five six
Boom boom
Five Six
Sir, Are you on INSTAGRAM???
instagram.com/alex_tzavaras/
this is cool ! but it s wet on wet ,! it s quite special style not a reference for basics learning !
Lovely tutorial, but I had to watch to it with the volume off because that song is so annoying!
I hate the song omg 56 boom boom. Love the video tho.
normale geschwindigkeit bitte. Danke
great video, horrible music.