The Ultimate Classical Art Course - Painting the Mona Lisa

It sounds simple but if you are still using a pencil sharpener to sharpen your pencils - this video is for you! I will show you how to use a stanley knife to sharpen your pencils so you can expose a greater amount of lead and make a finer point. This way of sharpening pencils also makes them last longer before you have to sharpen them again.

For this exercise you will need a pencil, a stanley knife and some sandpaper.

Pencil sketches are an artist's best friend. They are quick and easy to do and can capture a lot of information in a fresh and efficient way. Keeping an active sketch book is a great way to jot down ideas on the go, and when you are time limited.

It is also a great way to learn about the composition of other paintings. Take a sketchbook out with you to museums and art galleries to get a glimpse into the minds of great artists showing there: sketch their paintings and sculptures to capture the essential information and take a crash course in composition.

For this exercise you will need paper, a pencil and an eraser.

It's important to keep our charcoal sharp so we can draw more easily.

For this exercise will need charcoal and sandpaper. I recommend using Nitram charcoal.

Charcoal value studies are a great way to understand the values in a painting - whether we are making a master copy or creating our own compositions.

It allows us to play around with lighting and shadows in our compositions and we can make several charcoal value studies of similar compositions to see what works best before starting the final work.

For our master copy project, we can use the value study to remind us of the hierarchy of values in the Mona Lisa and their relationships. Doing a small value sketch forces us to compress the values and thus, more accurately represent them. It's easy to get distracted by detail when we come to paint the larger painting and it's easy to lose track of our overall value relationships. This value study is a helpful reference point to keep us on track.

For this exercise you will need toned paper, charcoal, white chalk and an eraser. If you don't have toned paper, use white paper and omit the white chalk.

I will be stretching my own canvas for the painting, however you can buy pre-stretched canvases from any art store. This video contains some information about canvas types.

If you haven't decided what size you want to do the painting, or whether to paint the whole painting - this is the time to decide as we will be starting the painting in the next section.

Notes on canvas type - I would recommend you buy a linen canvas over a cotton canvas.

I am going to paint the full version of the Mona Lisa which measure 18 x 26 inches on a linen canvas (brand: claessens, type: 20)

If you are interested in stretching your own canvas please see the following video. It is also possible to work on canvas board.

For those of you interested in materials and processes - stretching your own canvas is a great skill to have.

For this you will need:

1 x staple gun and staples

1 x measuring tape

1 x canvas plier

1 x scissors or a stanley knife

1 x hammer

2 pairs of stretcher bars (4 total)

1 x canvas (your canvas should be the size of your stretcher bars plus 10 cm, e.g. to stretch a 50 x 60cm canvas, you will need a 60 x 70cm piece of canvas)

An imprimatura is a "stain" or "tone" that we apply to the canvas prior to painting on it. This covers the white of the canvas and is a useful for a number of reasons.

In the next lecture we will use what we've learned in this video and apply it to our master copy.

Now it's time for us to put an imprimatura on our canvas.

For this exercise you will need - your canvas, kitchen towel, linseed oil, turpentine or other mineral spirit/solvent and oil paint. The colours of the oil paint are: raw umber and ivory black.

You need to print the black and white images of the Mona Lisa to do this part of the course. You can find them in "Section 1: Getting started with the course" in the resources section of the lecture "How to use this course".

A transfer drawing is a drawing that we draw and then transfer onto a canvas. This can be a freehand drawing or sketch, or in our case, a drawing made from the print of the Mona Lisa.

Transfer drawings are amazingly helpful in a number of ways. Firstly, they allow us to place our drawing exactly where we want it on our canvas. If we do the drawing first, we can move the transfer paper containing the drawing around on our canvas until we find the perfect position.

This is especially helpful in our personal work when we're painting portraits. If we paint our block-in drawing directly onto our canvas and realise that the composition would benefit if everything was moved one centimeter to the left, we would have to repaint the entire composition - and with wet paint on the canvas, this would be a difficult and messy task.

However, if we do a transfer drawing first, we can spend time making a great drawing that we can then place exactly where we want it on the canvas.

Working with pencil or charcoal in the beginning to sketch out the composition instead of paint is also a great for beginners as it takes away the moveable element of paint which can be hard to control when you're learning.

We are not drawing the Mona Lisa from scratch but we will be using the method of a transfer drawing to put her onto our canvas.

For this exercise you will need - your canvas, print outs for the version of the Mona Lisa you will be painting, charcoal, a pen, 1 x sheet of transfer (tracing) paper, masking tape and scissors.

Our canvas is ready for us to start painting!

Before you start painting, make sure that you can see a reference of the Mona Lisa. Either use a device such as a computer, iPad or laptop. Or print out a colour version of the Mona Lisa and have it beside your painting. It's handy to tape a printed reference to a board and stand it beside your painting.

The colour references can be found in "Section one: Getting started with the course" in the resources section of the lecture "Introduction to the Mona Lisa".

The first thing we're going to do is an underpainting using the oil colour: raw umber. We will also use the colour: ivory black, to darken some areas.

For this exercise you will need a painting palette, oil paint: raw umber and ivory black, linseed oil, a palette cup (to put your linseed oil in) and paint brushes.

Use brushes designed to be used with oil paint and when it comes to shape and material, I would recommend having some filberts in your collection and some hog bristles.

The aim of our underpainting is to block in the painting using broad areas of light and shadow to articulate the overall composition. Imagine we are making a map but before we draw all the countries and cities, we first want to draw our continents. We are working from big to small, leaving the details for last.

Our first goal with the painting is simply to put paint on the canvas. Don't worry too much about this stage being perfect. All paintings have to start somewhere and the sooner we put paint on the canvas, the easier it will be to improve and perfect our work.

Now we know what we are doing, this video is a continuation of the underpainting to accompany you as you paint. We will continue blocking in the painting using a mixture of raw umber and ivory black.

Before you finish painting for the day, it's a good idea to soften the edges of your painting. Using a paint brush, soften any transitions between shapes and values and make sure you don't have any thick ridges as you don't want your painting to dry with ridges on it. You want the surface to remain smooth so it's easy to paint on top of.

This is a good practice for the end of any painting session where you intend to continue painting the next day.

Keeping your painting soft also keeps it flexible, as it requires that you need to keep working on the drawing the next day and not become complacent. This improves the drawing and forces you to make better decisions with a fresh eye.

In this part of the course we will learn how to clean our palette and our brushes. We will also learn a special trick to store our brushes to stop them from splaying.

It's important to note that a lot of oil paints are toxic and turpentine and white spirits contain harmful chemicals. For this reason, please be careful when you're handling these materials and don't ever put your brushes anywhere near your mouth.

Lots of artists choose to wear disposable plastic gloves when tidying up and also when painting.

Your safety is your responsibility so please take care when painting and be aware of your materials.

In this section I will introduce to you the color palette we will be using to paint the Mona Lisa. I will also show you how to lay out your colours on your palette.

In this painting we will be working with a limited palette.  The colours you will need are: Ivory Black, Cobalt Blue, English Red, Vermillion, Yellow Ochre and Titanium White. These are the colours I am working with and are those that I would recommend.

The brands I would recommend using if you are looking for the highest quality artists oil paint are: Old Holland and Michael Harding. You also have Gamblin and a variety of others. Another brand that are good and less expensive are Winsor and Newton - I am using Winsor and Newon's Titanium White.

You can swap out the Vermillion for Cadmium Red if you already have Cadmium Red.

In essence, our palette is formed of: black, blue, red (one earth red, one cool red), yellow and white. We are working with the primary colours.

In this part of the course we will mix our colour palette. Initially we will use the colours that we have mixed to do a small "colour" study, where we will test our colours out by doing a small sketch of the Mona Lisa, just like we did with our pencil sketch and charcoal value study - only this time we will be using paint.

Mixing colours takes practice and we are unlikely to get it right first time. More importantly, we want to be focussing on painting our values correctly anyway (how light or dark something is) rather than worrying about the shade or hue of our colour mixes. So practice mixing colours with this course, but know that training your eye to draw better will help you see colours better. Everything takes practice.

The easiest way to try out colours out is to do a sketch. So in preparation for the next lecture, you will need to have your painting equipment ready and a small piece of canvas/canvas paper/canvas board/scrap canvas (with an imprimatura on it).

In this exercises we will use the colours that we have mixed to paint a small painting of the Mona Lisa. Using our knowledge of the composition and value relationships which we learned about in the "pencil sketch" and in the "charcoal value sketch" - we are now going to add colour to the mix!

Colour studies, also know as "compositional sketches" are a fully realised miniature painting by which we can truly see how our colour choices, composition and value relationships work together (or not) to create the finished work.

This is a highly valuable and useful exercise that you can use in your personal painting practice when you are developing an idea. We can use all the elements of our idea and distill in into a simple image - not only that but we can play with it too.

Colour studies give us the opportunity to try out different colours, backgrounds, compositional elements and lighting so we can see the impact of each idea in a condensed way before deciding on the finished design.

For this project, as we are doing a master copy, our primary interest is the colours themselves and our goal is to lay them down in a way that is coherent with the values we see in the painting.  We are aiming to put down the right colours with the right values, in the right place.

It's easiest to see this by squinting at your reference image and painting what you see through squinted eyes as our study is too small to put in detail.

When you squint at your painting, you should be able to recognise the Mona Lisa in it, even if it is just a vague idea.

Have you ever wondered what all the different painting mediums are and how we use them? This video covers some of the most well known oil painting mediums and solvents, and explores their properties and what makes them different from each other.

We will also learn about the "fat over lean" rule which is widely talked about in regards to oil painting.

This video should clear up any doubts you have about oil mediums, solvents, mineral spirits and the oil painting process which varies a lot from other types of paint such as acrylic and watercolour.

You might have heard academic and classical oil painters talk about lead white in reverential hushed tones. Why is the pigment so special? This brief video will give you an overview of lead white and offer some alternatives.

Lead white has been used by many famous artists throughout time, especially during the renaissance. You can still buy it today though it is more difficult to find. It's important to note that it is a highly toxic paints due the fact it contains the poisonous metal: lead.

However, there is no risk if you use it safely.

Having tested out our colours in our colour study, we are now going to apply them to our painting. Continuing the idea of working from big to small (broader shapes and colours to more specific shapes and colours) we are not going to start "piecemeal" as is so often the method used by artists of today.

We want to develop the painting as a whole, this is to help us paint accurately. It is the method we use when painting from life which is an exciting practice and one of the foundations of academic painting. We are using this project to learn a method that we can apply to live portrait sittings, still life and landscape painting.

It also trains our eye to see more accurately by compressing the large shapes and overarching plays of light and shadow to describe a lot with as few details as possible.

This is essential when we are painting portraits from life because people are not static objects; they move, get tired, drift into different poses, and not only that but the lighting changes - especially when we're working with natural light, so it's important to be able to capture what we see as quickly as possible, so we don't lose it or end up painting different poses which results in an inaccurate drawing.

We will continue blocking in the painting in this video, keeping your paint thin and aim to create a larger version of your colour study.

We will continue blocking in the painting in this video. This video is demonstration only and valuable if you would like to see the process from beginning to end. Work at your own pace until you have covered the entire canvas.

Before we finish for the day there are some things we can do to make our next painting session easier and more productive. These include but are not limited to: softening our edges so we are not restricted by drawing decisions that can be improved upon next time and flatting thick paint so our painting doesn't dry with ridges that change the texture of our surface and make it difficult to paint on top of.

Instead of disposing valuable oil paint into the bin, we can conserve oil paint so that it lasts longer. This video will show you how.

You can use either the earlier "How to mix your palette for the Mona Lisa" for reference, or this video where I remix and edit my colours based on my findings using the first pre-mixes. Based on your colour block-in that you just completed, you will now have a better understanding of your colour palette and any adjustments you might want to make to your colours to more accurately represent the colours in the Mona Lisa.

In this lecture we will understand what "sinking in" is and how we can remedy it in our painting. Sinking in occurs due to the absorbency of our canvas and refers to the oil in our paint and medium being absorbed beyond the surface of our painting, resulting in our painting looking desaturated. However, this is only an illusion and there is a simple solution - oiling out. We will learn how to oil out our painting in this lecture.

With our colour block in complete, we will now develop our painting into the final work. The first thing we need to do is key our values. Keying our values means setting the limits of our value scale - how dark is the painting at it's darkest point and how light is it? Once we have those limits and mark them in our painting we can use them as a reference for all the values in our painting.

Learn how to to relate different parts of the painting to draw more accurately - nothing exists in isolation.

As we continue painting we will learn a about colours and their properties, how different types of edges and transitions describe form, how to abstract what we're looking at, the art of squinting, and how to use negative space to draw accurate shapes.

We will continue painting the portrait in this video. This video is demonstration only and valuable if you would like to see the process from beginning to end. Work at your own pace, practicing the techniques we learned in the previous video: varying edge quality and transitions to describe form, abstracting shapes, squinting, painting negative space.