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.
Portrait Painting in Lockdown - John Singer Sargent Master CopySIMPLIFY Drawing and Painting2020-04-04 | While we’re in Lockdown, it’s really important that we keep Painting! Even if your Art classes have been cancelled.
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.
In this oil painting tutorial, portrait artist Alex Tzavaras shows you the best way to learn Colour mixing for begginers.
Colour mixing is one of the most challenging things about oil painting for beginners. There are an infinite variety of colours in nature. Not only that, when you go to any art store there are so many pigments to choose from. To help us make sense of all this, we have numerous colour theories. One of the most comprehansive is the Munsell Colour System, created by the artist Aflred Henry Munsell.
Munsell specified three properties of colour, HUE, VALUE and CHROMA. In this portrait painting tutorial, Alex show you how to paint a portrait using a limited palette constisting of Titanium White, Cadmium Lemon, Alizarin Crimson and Ultramarine Blue. Using a palette made up of more intense or chromatic versions of the three primary colours is the best ways for beginners to understand these three principles of HUE, VALUE and CHROMA
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.
In this Portrait Painting tutorial Alex Tzavaras shows you how to paint realistic portraits using an Alla Prima oil painting technique. Alex demonstrates 3 portrait painting techniques that will instantly make your portrait paintings more lifelike.
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.
In this Alla Prima oil painting tutorial, representational artist Alex Tzavaras shows you how to draw with proportions correctly.
Many Artists think they can "measure" proportions by using their thumb and a pencil, brush or other devices like proportional dividers. But there are many reasons why this doesn't always work. The only way you can be absolutely certain that something is in proportion is when you can actually SEE IT! There's also something REALLY fundamental about drawing proportions and when you understand THIS, you will learn how to draw proportions without measuring.
Alex Tzavaras is a contemporary realist artist offering portrait painting and alla prima oil painting tutorials for beginners. Alex teaches the traditional painting techniques artists used to draw and paint from life up until the start of the 20th century.
Connect with Alex: instagram.com/alex_tzavarasWhy Spectacles Make Portrait Painting Easier #shorts #portraitpainting #oilpaintingsSIMPLIFY Drawing and Painting2023-09-06 | ...My FASTEST Technique for Realistic Oil PaintingsSIMPLIFY Drawing and Painting2023-07-11 | In this Alla Prima oil painting tutorial, artist Alex Tzavaras shows you his fastest oil painting techniques, for achieving incredibly realistic oil paintings.
For this realistic oil painting tutorial, Alex used the following palette of colours:
Titanium White Cadmium Yellow Yellow Ochre Cadmium Red Light Alizarin Crimson Transparent Oxide Red Raw Umber Viridian Ultramarine Blue
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.The SECRET to Making a Portrait Look Like Your ModelSIMPLIFY Drawing and Painting2023-05-21 | #portrait #portraitpainting #portraitpaintingtutorial In this Alla Prima Portrait Painting tutorial, Alex Tzavaras shows you the secret to making a portrait look like your model.
Learning how to capture a likeness in a portrait painting is one of the toughest challenges an Artist can face. But while you may think accurately drawing features like the eyes is the key to success, there is an ESSENTIAL STEP you need to get right in the early stages of a portrait painting which holds the SECRET of how to acheive a likeness in a portrait painting. Get this step wrong and you will definitely struggle to acheive a likeness in a portrait.
Alex Tzavaras is a contemporary realist artist offering Alla Prima portrait painting and 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.
How to Capture Character in a Portrait. See the full length video: youtube.com/watch?v=sI86_n84k4Y&t=622sThe Most Important thing YOU NEED in a PortraitSIMPLIFY Drawing and Painting2023-04-23 | In this Alla Prima portrait painting tutorial, realist painter Alex Tzavaras shows you how to paint mouths, the key to capturing facial expressions.
The most importrant things you need to acheive in a portrait is the paint the facial expression. The facial expression shows us our subjects character and inner life and it's this emotional quality, that the viewer really responds to when they see a portrait painting. So in this oil painting tutorial Alex shows you how to paint facial expressions by painting the mouth, the facial feature that hold the key to capturing the expression
Alex Tzavaras is a contemporary realist artist offering Alla Prima portrait painting and oil painting tutorials. Alex teaches the traditional portrait painting techniques artists used to draw and paint from life up until the start of the 20th century.Portrait of Rosie #shortsSIMPLIFY Drawing and Painting2023-03-10 | See the longer video on how to paint eyes youtube.com/watch?v=YtsEOXmqm1k&t=15sPortrait Painting From Life #shortsSIMPLIFY Drawing and Painting2023-03-05 | Portrait painting from life using an Alla Prima oil painting technique. Click on the link to see a longer version of exactly how this was done: youtube.com/watch?v=u907YVPY8iY&t=605sThe Incredible Way to Paint Skin in a Portrait PaintingSIMPLIFY Drawing and Painting2023-02-12 | #portraitpainting #portraitart The Incredible Way to Paint Vibrant Skin Colours in a Portrait Painting.
In this Alla Prima portrait painting tutorial, realist Painter Alex Tzavaras shows you an incredible way to paint skin in a portrait.
When we're portrait painting in oil, we're presented with a wide variety of skin tones. When we're mixing skin tones, we don't actually need to match any of the colours we see precisely. Instead, we need to match the variety itself, between warmer and cooler, more intense or more nuetral skin tones. So if you want to learn how to mix skin tones, you need to think of them in terms of their colour temperature relationships.
If when we're mixing skin tones, we only need to match the relationships between the colours and not the colours themselves, this means we can push the colour. We can increase the colour intensity of certain notes or even invent colours. In this way we can create more colourful vibrant skin tones. As long as your skin tones are the correct value and colour temperature, your portrait painting will still appear lifelike
Alex Tzavaras is a contemporary realist artist offering portrait painting and alla prima oil painting tutorials. Alex teaches the traditional oil painting techniques artists used to draw and paint from life up until the start of the 20th century.
Connect with Alex: instagram.com/alex_tzavaras https://www.facebook.com/simplifydraw... twitter.com/alextzavaras http://alextzavaras.comHow to Paint Eyes - The Biggest Mistake Artists MakeSIMPLIFY Drawing and Painting2022-10-16 | In this portrait painting tutorial, realist painter Alex Tzavaras will demonstrating how to paint eyes, he also shows you the biggest mistake artists make when painting eyes and how to avoid it.
Most tutorials on painting realistic eyes only focus on how to paint just one eye on its own, but painting one is actually quite straightforward compared to painting both eyes together. By far the most challenging thing to do when painting the eyes, is making sure both eyes are alligned correctly with each other. Not only is it really easy to make the eyes crooked, but there are some other really common art mistakes to avoid. You can also paint the eyes too far apart, too close together, or you can make one eye bigger than the other.
In this portrait painting demonstration, Alex will be showing you how to paint both eyes together and he will be sharing with you the techniques he uses and the artistic anatomy he checks, to help him avoid making these really common art mistakes
Alex Tzavaras is a contemporary realist artist offering portrait painting and alla prima oil painting tutorials. Alex teaches the traditional oil painting techniques artists used to draw and paint from life up until the start of the 20th century.
John Singer Sargent was one of the leading portrait painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In an age when there were so many outstanding realist painters, Sargent was particulary renowned for his virtuosity and skill. For this reason, he is one of the most influential artists on realist painters today.
Sargent used an Alla Prima oil painting technique, where paint is applied wet on wet with out letting earlier layers dry. The process being followed in this portrait painting demonstration is based on eyewitness accounts of the Sargent's working methods, taken from a biography written in 1927 by The Hon. Evan Charteris. Charteris' book is now longer in print, but fortunately for us we can still read about these accounts thanks to a fantastic ebook titled "Advice on Painting from John Singer Sargent" written by the Artist Thomas Jefferson Kitts. Kitts has very generously made available an extremely valuable resource, which anyone interested in John Singer Sargent's oil painting techniques should definitely read.
To download "Advice on Painting from John Singer Sargent" for free! Visit Thomas Jefferson Kitts' website:
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.
There is a full length version of this portrait painting demo, included in Alex's Alla Prima Portrait Painting Course, over on Patreon: patreon.com/simplifydrawingandpainting
Alex Tzavaras will be doing a whole series of portrait painting tutorials on how to paint the features in a portrait painting with oils. Stay tuned for upcoming videos on how to paint the eyes and mouth, But for the first of these portrait painting demos, Alex will be showing you how to paint a realistic ear using an Alla Prima oil painting technique.
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.
The main difference when painting a portrait of someone with dark skin compared to someone with lighter skin is that there will be much wider range of tonal values. This means the shadows, lights and highlights will appear further apart from each other and the lights will appear much darker. For this reason, a really common mistake is to think dark skin tones are shadows, when in fact they are in areas of light. To solve this problem in portrait painting, as well as thinking in terms of light and dark tonal values, it's really important that we study study our subject's form and observe which parts of are facing towards or away from the light source.
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.
When oil painting, we are not actually painting the object placed in front of us. What we are really painting is light. This makes art studio lighting our most important art material.
The best art studio lighting for painting is natural daylight. In the Northern hemisphere this would be from a North facing window. However, we do not all have the luxury of a painting studio with natural light. Also some of us may choose to work outside of daylight hours. If that is case, there are lots of different kinds of art studio lighting setups available using Daylight lamps. But not all daylight lamps are created equal. In this video Alex shows you what he believes to be the best kind of daylight lamps to use, Bi-Colour LED Video light. Using these lights, Alex show you how you can acheive a painting studio lighting set up at home that is comparable with natural daylight.
0:00 Intro 0:57 Natural Daylight 2:57 Bi-Colour LED Video Lights 4:33 Pixapro VNIX1000B 4:46 Neewer 660 5:42 Light Temperature 6:34 Colour Rendering Index 8:35 Adjusting Brightness 9:09 Diffusers and Soft Boxes 9:45 Lighting your Canvas and Palette 10:40 Fluorescent Strip Lights 11:28 Easel Lamps 12:12 Dealing with Glare
The Daylight lamps Alex recommends using, are the following Bi-Colour Dimmable LED Video lights:
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.
Over modelling happens when you focus in on each small are of your subject separately and exaggerate the differences in light and dark tonal values in oil painting. If you then exaggerate the tonal values in painting within each small area, you loose the larger value relationships and your image so it no longer appears 3D. This is a really common beginner oil painting mistake.
To avoid over modelling, you need to see the whole before the parts. You need to establish the larger tonal value relationships by simplifying your subject into 3 or 4 main tonal values. However, simplifying your subject into large value masses is one of the most difficult things we have to do when painting. But in this video, Alex demonstrates what this actually looks like in practice, while an Alla prima portrait from life, using a monochrome or grissaille oil painting technique . He also shows you a really useful tool in Adobe Photoshop, The Median Tool, that you can use to simplify the tonal values for you, when you are working from reference photos.
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.
Susan Lyon studied art at the American Academy of Art in Chicago. She was also a member of Chicago’s Palette and Chisel Club, where she met her husband, artist Scott Burdick and worked alongside other renowned realist painters like Richard Schmid and Nancy Guzik.
Susan is a great teacher. Alex first became aware of her work, quite soon after he began painting and purchased some of her videos. They helped him improve immensely and he has since adopting some of Susan’s realist painting techniques into his own practice and teaching. Alex is also a VIP member of Susan’s Patreon channel and continues to consult Susan for advice on his own painting.
To see more demonstrations by Susan, visit her Patreon Channel: patreon.com/susanlyon
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.
Susan Lyon studied art at the American Academy of Art in Chicago. She was also a member of Chicago’s Palette and Chisel Club, where she met her husband, artist Scott Burdick and worked alongside other renowned realist painters like Richard Schmid and Nancy Guzik.
Susan is a great teacher. Alex first became aware of her work, quite soon after he began painting and purchased some of her videos. They helped him improve immensely and he has since adopting some of Susan’s realist painting techniques into his own practice and teaching. Alex is also a VIP member of Susan’s Patreon channel and continues to consult Susan for advice on his own painting.
To see more demonstrations by Susan, visit her Patreon Channel: patreon.com/susanlyon
00:00 Intro 02:02 Susan's Portrait Demonstration 08:54 The Importance of Economy of Brushwork 16:46 Susan's Drawings 20:17 Susan's Recent Paintings 25:39 Still Life Painting 31:04 Colours and Limited Palettes 39:09 Painting from Life 49:49 Being an Artist 55:40 Susan's Education and How She Became an Artist 1:02:33 The Palette & Chisel and Meeting Scott Burdick 1:07:16 Art Education and Realism in the United States 1:15:19 The Resurgence of Realist Painting Online 1:21:16 Advice for Artists Just Starting to Paint.
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.
Texture is another key characteristic that we need need to think about when oil painting from life. It doesn't get spoken about as much as the other fundamental principles like colour and tonal values in oil painting, but it is very important because when we observe nature we see different textures everywhere. So when we are oil painting, in order to produce something realistic, as well as making sure our subject is the correct shape and colour, we also need to create textures with oil paint. This may sound challenging but actually, creating textures on canvas can make some complicated subjects easier to paint.
To demonstrate how this can be done, Alex completes a plein air oil painting using palette knife painting techniques. A palette knife is another versatile tool which can be used to apply oil paint in a variety of ways. In this landscape painting tutorial Alex shows you how palette knife painting can be really effective for creating texture on canvas.
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.
In this oil painting tutorial, realist painter Alex Tzavaras shows you another great Alla Prima still life exercise for achieving really vibrant colours - Painting Roses.
Flowers have some of the most intense colours we see in nature. They are one of the only places where you might use pure colour straight out of the tube. With all of their petals, Roses offer a wide variety of hard and soft edges and intricate small details. Which makes painting roses in oil extremely valuable for not only learning hot to paint vibrant colours but also ho to tackle complicated subjects with lots of detail.
This is a shorter version of an Alla Prima oil painting tutorial which as part of Alex's Essentials of Colour course. The full length version, where Alex shows you how to paint roses in oil from start to finish is available to watch over on Patreon:
The colours used in this Alla Prima oil painting tutorial where; Titanium White, Cadmium Lemon, Cadmium Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Red, Alizarin Crimson, Tranparent Oxide Red, Viridian and Ultramarine Blue. All by Michael Harding oil Paints.
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.
Alex completes a still life painting in oil colour and shows you how to capture the quality of really colourful subjects using a broken colour painting technique.
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.
00:00 Intro 00:28 Oil Painting Mediums for Glazing Techniques 01:45 What is an Oil Painting Medium? 02:00 Solvents and Thinners 02:42 Linseed Oil 03:18 Polymerisation 03:50 The Fat Over Lean Painting Technique 04:40 How to avoid Sinking in 05:37 Different Ingredients and Recipes for Oil Painting Mediums 06:40 Liquin and Other Modern Alkyd Oil Painting Mediums 07:28 Using Mediums with Alla Prima Oil Painting Techniques 08:42 Using Oil Painting Mediums on Less Absorbent Surfaces 09:30 Linseed Standing Oil 10:35 How to Mix an Oil Painting Medium with Linseed Stand Oil 11:15 When to use Oil Painting mediums 11:50 How much Oil Painting Medium to use 12:10 What is Oiling Out? 13:42 Retouching Varnish 14:50 How to Varnish an Oil Painting
We have this idea that oil painting mediums are some sort of magic ingredients that hold the secret to succesful oil painting. But do we really need to use them?
We have inherited the idea that oil painting mediums and techniques are necessary from rennaisance times, when artists used an oil painting technique called glazing. Artists would use oil painting mediums for glazing techniques, in order to make their colours transparent. Their oil painting medium recipes where often closely garden secrets.
If you are not using glazing techniques, but are instead using a direct or Alla prima oil painting technique, then oil painting mediums do not play such an important role. In fact, you can most definitely paint without using any oil painting medium at all. However, there are some circumstances in Alla Prima oil painting, when you may choose to use oil painting mediums and techniques. So, in this video Alex explains when these situations might occur and he shows you how to use oil painting mediums.
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.
Here are some of Alex's other videos on the fundamental principles of oil painting.
Alex is copying a portrait painting John Singer Sargent did of his teacher Carolus Duran. Completed in 1879, at Carolus Duran's Atelier in Paris, where he taught direct Alla Prima oil painting techniques.
To do this exercise yourselves, download a free version of Sargent's original painting here: https://www.clarkart.edu/artpiece/detail/Carolus-Duran
To paint this copy Alex uses the Zorn Palette. A limited palette usually made up of four colours, Ivory Black, Vermillion or Cadmium Red Light, Yellow Ochre and White. However, intead of Cadmium Red Light, Alex has substuted it with Winsor Red by Winsor and Newton. A much cheaper colour that uses a pigent called PYROLLE Red PY255.
This video is an add on to Alex's previous video on oil paints, in which he suggests some cheaper alternatives to expensive colours like Cadmium Red and Yellow.
To see Alex's master copy of Juan De Pareja by Diego Velázquez, filmed entirely in real time, visit: youtube.com/watch?v=JoCSaNKDyNg
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.Oil Paints - What Colours and Which Brands Should You useSIMPLIFY Drawing and Painting2021-02-18 | In this oil painting tutorial, realist painter Alex Tzavaras shows you what colours and which brands of oil paint you should use.
When you walk into any art supply store, you will find hundreds of colours and many different oil paint brands. If you are a beginner and you do not know what you are looking for it can be hard to know where to begin. In this latest video in his series on art supplies, Alex talks about all the different kinds of oil paint brands that there are and he tells you which he thinks are the top oil paint brands and which are the best oil colours for painting.
He also completes a Plein Air oil painting, using a limited palette of primary colours, to show you how you do not need a lot of expensive colours in order to produce realistic oil paintings.
0:00 Intro 0:40 The 3 Different Grades of OIl Paint 1:26 Student Grade Paint 3:10 Mid-Range Artists Grade Paint 4:00 High Quality Professional Grade Paint 6:41 Plein Air Painting with a Limited Palette 11:06 Making Sure You Use Enough Paint 15:44 Painting With a Palette Knife 18:02 The Properties of Different Pigments
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 more info on the Master Class oil paint range by Nevskaya Palitra of St. Petersburg: https://www.craftystudio.ie/shop/master-class-professional-quality-oil-paint/
In this in-depth oil painting tutorial, realist painter Alex Tzavaras shows you exactly how he makes his farourite surfaces to work on, by stretching canvases and preparing panels for oil painting made with oil primed linen.
0:00 Intro 1:28 The difference between oil primer and acrylic gesso 2:34 Fitting together wooden stretcher bars 5:16 Making Canvases with un-primed raw linen 8:52 Preparing rabbit skin glue 10:04 Sizing un-primed raw linen 14:20 Applying an oil primer ground 18:32 Making a canvas with pre-primed linen 22:36 Using wooden canvas keys 24:03 Gluing pre-primed linen to panels
This is Alex's second video on how to make you own canvas for oil painting. In his previous video he showed you some cheap, quick and easy to make surfaces to be used for studies and practicing. The surfaces in this video, take longer to prepare but are professional artists' quality and they will perform much better archivally.
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.
The support, or surface you paint on is one of the most important art materials you need to consider when oil painting. Almost as much as the brushes you paint with, the surface you use will also affect the appearance of "style" of you work. So finding surfaces that you like, is really important for developing your own personal oil painting techniques.
There are a wide variety of different surfaces you can use for oil painting. In this video, Alex shows you a few options that are easy to prepare and are much better value and a lot nicer to work on than the commercial ready made canvases you mind in most Art supply stores. He also explains the difference between absorbent and non-absorbent surfaces and why he prefers smoother non-absorbent surfaces.
0:00 Intro 2:04 Acrylic Gesso 3:55 Stretching Paper 5:00 Rabbit Skin Glue 6:15 Water Based Polyurethane 8:00 Vellum 10:40 Why I prefer smoother non-absorbent surfaces
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.
The 5 essential shadows of a portrait, the 2 eyesockets, the shadow under the nose, the upper lip and the shadow under the bottom lip are vitally important. Whenever you are drawing a portrait or portrait painting in oil, getting a likeness in a portrait depends on placing these 5 shadows accurately. You should have these shadows placed correctly before you start working on the refining stages of your portrait, or adding any details, because no amount of detailed work will make something look like your sitter if there is anything wrong with any of the 5 essential shadows.
In this alla prima oil painting tutorial, Alex domonstrates with a plaster cast how he uses centerlines to help him place the 5 essential shadows accurately. In addition to this oil painting demo, there is a full length version, filmed in real time, available to watch on Alex's Patreon Cannel. You can also download a high-res reference image of this cast and have a go at this exercise yourselves, here:
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.
In Alex's last portrait painting tutorial, he spoke about the different kinds of oil painting brushes and he showed you how to use them.
Now, you can't make a video on brushes without talking about another extremely important subject; how to take care of your brushes properly. So, in this video shows you the things he does to make sure his brushes remain in good condtion. He also gives you a few tips on how you can save time, as brush cleaning after oil painting can be pretty tedious.
0:00 Intro 1:40 Mineral Spirits and Other Kinds of Solvent 2:05 How to Clean Paint Brushes with Mineral Spirits 2:55 Recycling Mineral Spirits 4:00 How to Clean Your Brushes with Oil 5:10 How to Clean Your Brushes with Soap and Water 6:35 Wrapping Your Brushes so They Hold Their Shape 07:04 Removing Dried Paint from Your brushes
To see Alex's previous portrait painting tutorial on brushes and how to achieve looser brushwork:
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.
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.
Here's a list of the brushes Alex used for this demo:
1 x Rosemary & Co Series 279 Masters Choice Long Flat, Size 10 1 x Rosemary & Co Ivory Synthetic Long Flat, Size 10 1 x Rosemary & Co Ivory Synthetic Long Flat, Size 8 1 x Cornelissen Series 44 Hog Bristle Filbert, Size 10 2 x Cornelissen Series 44 Hog Bristle Filbert, Size 8 2 x Cornelissen Series 44 Hog Bristle Filbert, Size 4 1 x Isabey Mongoose hair, Filbert, Size 6 1 x Rosemary & Co Series 278 Masters Choice Long Filbert, Size 3 1 x Rosemary & Co Series 278 Masters Choice Long Filbert, Size 2 2 x Rosemary & Co Series 279 Masters Choice Long Flat, Size 2 1 x Rosemary & Co Series 279 Masters Choice Long Flat, Size 0 2 x Rosemary & Co Evergreen Egberts, Size 4 2 x Rosemary & Co Eclipse Combers ¼” 2 x Rosemary & Co Eclipse Combers 1/8” 1 x Cornelissen Sable Round, Size 2
Here's a list of the Colours that were used:
Titanium White Yellow Ochre Cadmium Red Light Alizarin Crimson Transparent Oxide Red Ultramarine Blue Ivory Black
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.Portrait Painting Tutorial - Velázquez Master Copy (Part 3)SIMPLIFY Drawing and Painting2020-08-09 | Part 3 of a portrait painting tutorial by realist artist Alex Tzavaras. Alex paints a master copy of Juan de Pareja by Baroque artist Diego Velázquez. Filmed entirely in real time.
Master copies of old masters paintings is a great exercise, which will give you valuable insights into the oil painting techniques used by the artists of the past. You can also do them at home if you don't have access to a model. This was copied from a high res Image that you can down load for free from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website:
This portrait painting tutorial was filmed in real time, with nothing taken out. So, if you want to try this exercise yourselves, you can follow along.
0:00 Intro 2:35 Reflected Lights in the Shadows 8:00 How to Use Medium 11:30 Painting the Hairline 19:35 Painting the Highlights 22:25 Painting the Mouth 36:00 Colour Temperature 56:50 Painting the Beard 1:11:30 Painting the Hair 1:13:30 Glazing Oil Painting Technique 1:16:30 Painting the Background 1:25:30 Edges Around the Hair 1:32:45 Painting the Collar
To let Alex know how you got on with this exercise, please tag him on instagram: instagram.com/alex_tzavaras
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. .
Master copies of old master paintings are a great exercise, which will give you valuable insights into the oil painting techniques used by the artists of the past. You can also do them at home if you don't have access to a model. This was copied from a high res Image that you can down load for free from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website:
This portrait painting tutorial was filmed in real time, with nothing taken out. So, if you want to try this exercise yourselves, you can follow along.
0:00 Intro 1:40 The Refining Stages of a Portrait 4:10 The Essential Features of a Portrait 5:00 Painting the Bridge of the Nose 7:15 Working from The Corners of the Eyes 12:00 Painting the left Eye 13:45 The Importance of Soft and Hard Edges 22:00 Painting the Right Eye 35:00 Adding small Details 40:35 Adding Variations of Colour 48:10 paintign the Nose
To let Alex know how you got on with this exercise, please tag him on instagram: instagram.com/alex_tzavaras
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.
Master copies of old master paintings are a great exercise, which will give you valuable insights into the oil painting techniques used by the artists of the past. You can also do them at home if you don't have access to a model. This was copied from a high res Image that you can down load for free from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website:
This portrait painting tutorial was filmed in real time, with nothing taken out. So, if you want to try this exercise yourselves, you can follow along.
0:00 Introduction 1:00 Palette of Colours 2:15 Toning the canvas 4:20 Mapping Out the head with Lines 7:20 Wiping Back the Lights 19:40 Mixing the Shadow Colour 20:00 Massing in the Darks 30:20 Mixing the Flesh Tone 31:15 Massing in the Lights 34:30 Mixing the Highlight Colour 34:45 Placing the Highlights 42: Mixing the MId-Tones 42:30 Massing in the Mid Tones
To let Alex know how you got on with this exercise, please tag him on instagram: instagram.com/alex_tzavaras
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. .
Andrew is an outstanding colourist. In this video, he shares some of his thoughts on colour, giving a valuable insight into the way he works. He is also entirely self taught and talks about he was able to achieve a very high standard in painting, without formal training, purely through his own efforts.
crowood.com/details.asp?isbn=9781785000492The Most Important Thing You Need to Know About Art MaterialsSIMPLIFY Drawing and Painting2020-02-07 | In this portrait painting tutorial, Alex Tzavaras talks about the most important thing you need to know about Art materials. Which is, that no amount of expensive art supplies will make you into a good painter.
To prove this hypothesis, Alex then paints a portrait painting in oil using the cheapest art materials he can find. In order to see how much of a difference they make to the standard of his work. He discusses which cheap art supplies, brushes, canvas, paint he found most difficult to use and which kind of better quality materials you should invest in first.
Alex Tzavaras is a representational artist specialising in traditional methods of drawing and painting from life. To find out more about his oil painting fundamentals course visit:
In portraiture, the term "plane" refers to a change in direction on the surface of the head. As the head turns towards or away from a light source, there will be a change in tonal value from light to dark. So whenever we try to creat the 3D appearance of the head when oil painting, being able to identify the different planes of the face and head is very important. It's also essential for achieving a painterly appearance in your work, by painting each plane with bold separate brushstrokes.
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.
Or connect with Alex: instagram.com/alex_tzavaras facebook.com/simplifydrawingandpainting twitter.com/alextzavaras http://alextzavaras.comHow to Paint Flesh Colours Using the Zorn PaletteSIMPLIFY Drawing and Painting2019-10-23 | In this portrait painting tutorial Realist Artist Alex Tzavaras shows you how to mix flesh colours using the Zorn Palette. A limited palette, named after the 19th Century Swedish Artist Anders Zorn, consisting of four colours, Titanium White, Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Red Light (or Vermillion) and Ivory Black, which is really convenient for mixing skin tones.
In addition to this Youtube version, there is also a full length version. Filmed entirely in real time with an in-depth commentary, explaining Alex's process in detail. Available now on SIMPLIFY Drawing & Painting's new Patreon Channel:
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.
This is another video on the essentials of mixing colours for oil painting. In Alex's previous tutorials on how to mix colour, he used a variety of limited palettes. A temperature palette, consisting of just transparent ovide ead and ultramarine, then a palette consisting of the three primary colours. For this demonstration, Alex shows you his full extended palette, consisting of:
Titanium White, Lemon Yellow, Cadmium Yellow, Naples yellow, Yellow ochre, Cadmium Red Light, Alizarin Crimson, Transparent Oxide Red, Raw Umber, Terre Vert, Viridian, Cobalt Blue, Ultramarine Blue and Ivory Black
To see Alex's other videos on how to mix oil paint colours:
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.
Applying a coloured wash of oil paint diluted with turpentine or mineral spirits, also refered to as an imprimatura, in order to tone your canvas before you start oil painting, will make judging and mixing colours much easier. In this video Alex shows you his method for putting down coloured grounds and explains why it is important to do so.
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.
Understanding colour intensity and saturation, or how bright and strong colours are, is really important when learning how to mix colours when oil painting. It is a subject that is not covered as much as other aspects of colour theory. However, it is a very common to see students mixing colours that are too saturated. The colours we see in nature are often more neutral, or greyer than we think.
In this painting tutorial, Alex gives you a simple still life oil painting exercise which will help you understand the concept of colour saturation and show you how to mix colours more accurately.
This is the second in a series of videos Alex has made on oil painting colour essentials. Here's a link to his previous video on colour temperature:
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.
Alex shows you, how you can achieve a life like result without having to match all the colours that you see exactly, but instead to just try and capture the colour temperature and value relationships.
This is Alex's second video on the subject of colour temperature, you can see the first one here:
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.
Ben works from life and is highly skilled at both landscape painting and portraiture. He specialises in a number of different mediums, including oil paints and pastels.
Before becoming a full time artist, Ben Also completed a PHD. Studying Mathematics and Physics at Cambridge University.
Here, Ben talks about how he became an Artist and how his scientific education has influenced his approach to working from life.
In this oil painting tutorial, Realist painter Alex Tzavaras talks about one of the essential principles for colour mixing when painting, COLOUR TEMPERATURE.
Colour is for many Artists, one of the most exciting aspects of visual Art. But it can also be one of the most confusing. Nature presents us with an almost infinite variety of colours and there are also so many different pigments, from which to choose when trying to mix all the colours that we see. So where to begin?
Fortunately, there are a few simple rules, we can use to help us make sense of this apparently complicated subject and colour need not be as confusing as it first appears.
In has video, Alex explains the principle of colour temparature, how it works and how it affects the way colours behave relative to each other. He also a simple and straightforward still life exercise which will help you understand and use colour temperature when mixing colours.
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.
Edges are one of the fundamental principals of painting from life. Painters create 3D form using light or dark tones, or values. The term edges, refers to the transitions between the areas of light or dark in a painting. For example, a hard outline of a light object silhouetted against a dark background, or the gradual transition from light to shadow on a round object. Understanding how edges work, is essential for achieving a really lifelike representation of what we see.
In this alla prima oil painting tutorial, Alex shares some simple rules for identifying different kinds of edges and the techniques he uses to paint them.
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.
Learning to paint from life is one of the most challenging activities you can choose to do. People believe that making progress has to do with talent, but it actually has a lot more to do with practice. In this video, Alex will show you how long it took him to learn to paint. With examples of his work from his early days as a beginner, right up to the present day. He describes how the way he works, has developed in decade or more he has been painting.
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.
In this oil painting tutorial, realist artist Alex Tzavaras talks about one of the most important properties of oil paint, the difference between opaque and transparent colours. He shows how these different pigments behave and demonstrates the correct opaque and transparent painting techniques in order to acheive clean colours.
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.
Or connect with Alex: instagram.com/alex_tzavaras facebook.com/simplifydrawingandpainting twitter.com/alextzavaras http://alextzavaras.comHow to Draw Using Comparative MeasurementSIMPLIFY Drawing and Painting2018-06-11 | In this charcoal drawing tutorial for beginners, portrait artist Alex Tzavaras gets to the real nuts and bolts of how to draw. He explains how he uses comparative measurement to help him achieve realistic drawings and tackle what is probably the most challenging aspect of working from life, getting the proportions accurate. Alex also discusses pros and cons of other traditional drawing techniques such as sight size.
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. .