ALVARO CASTAGNET Painting Review | Watercolor

Support me on Patreon:   / lironyan   Beginners Drawing Course: https://drawanythingusee.com/educatio... My Art and Creativity PODCAST: https://goo.gl/uGLjdk Instagram:   / lironyanil   My books on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Liron-Yankonsky... Snapchat: LironYan3 Alvaro Castagnet's website: https://alvarocastagnet.net/ 🎨REVIEWING PAINTINGS I LOVE 🎨 Hi there! In today's video I want to try out a pilot for an idea I've had for a while now. I want to choose paintings I love and review them here. And when I say review, I don't mean in the sense of what could have been done better, what's great about them and so on. What I want to do is talk about what I personally love about a painting, and try and get inside the mind of the artist who made it. I want to understand why they built it the way they did, what they were trying to achieve, and maybe even HOW they approached the actual painting process and stages! 🎨THIS IS A TES 🎨 I'm doing this video to give this idea a try. Let me know in a comment below if you want me to continue making these. This will really help me know (: I have a strange feeling this might be a great idea for a whole series. I also won't limit myself to watercolor paintings. I want to do the same for oils. 🎨 ALVARO CASTAGNET'S PAINTING 🎨 I thought I'd kick it off with this painting by Alvaro Castagnet. This painting immediately captivated me and I instantly knew it's going to be a favorite of mine. It has so many things I love about it. 🎨 SUMMARY OF MY TALKING POINTS 🎨 1. Notice how blurry the area on the right is. We don't see the actual details, but we can 100% understand what we are looking at. This is one of the things I LOVE the most about this kind of paintings. They include ONLY what's necessary, and nothing else. 2. By desaturating the painting we can see how similar the values of the domes and the sky are. Because of the color difference, it can be a little confusing to notice. 3. The bottom of the buildings is super dark, and many of the boats and people were probably negatively painted (meaning they were painted by painting the dark area around them). This could also have been used as a "stopping point" for the wash, allowing Alvaro to "rest" and divide his attention. 4. I also talk about my estimation for the general work process. I believe there was: (1) A very large and well-blended wash. (2) A darker wash that pulled everything together. This one probably includes the midtones AND rich shadows, and did a lot of the painting's "heavy lifting". (3) A final wash for the details of the boats and people. 5. Notice how Alvaro doesn't use black for shadows. He makes them very rich and interesting by using blues, reds and even yellows. 6. Generally speaking - shadows are connected whenever possible. This gives a more wholsome feel to the painting. If you want to see this better, try inverting the colors of the painting. You can also try turning it grayscale, and then inverting. It will become glaringly obvious how all the shadows are connected (: 7. Note the beautiful "criss-cross" used to abstract in the reflections. It's important for these strokes to also be as connected as possible. 8. On a macro level, there's a good combination of blurriness and sharpness. The top and bottom areas are generally blurry, while the mid-section with the boats and people is very sharp and has high contrast. 9. The water surface reflects the yellow of the buildings and the blue of the skies. 🎨 CONCLUSION 🎨 Let me know also what you think of this idea. Would you like to see me try and recreate a painting? In any case - this is it for today! I really hope you enjoyed this video (: If you want to support me, make sure to check out my Patreon page here -   / lironyan   And I'll talk to you again really soon. Liron ** MUSIC CREDITS ** Clear Sky by jimmysquare   / jimmysquare   Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported— CC BY 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... Music provided by Audio Library    • Video