Studying the masters: Edouard Manet

Another way of practicing painting is to copy other artworks and study them. This way, you'll be able to go through the artist's steps, learn how they mix paint, and think about what their composition says. We did this quite a lot in art school and I somehow remembered that this helped me a lot because I'm a visual person but I learn extra extra fast when I do or experience the things themselves.

Anyway, I wanna learn about painting earthy greens since I haven't done them in a long time. I also noticed myself putting so much vivid colors in one painting that I need to calm down lol.

I picked Edouard Manet's painting The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil (1874) for this study. I love Manet's paintings. His paintings evoke an emotion in me mostly because of his subjects and color palette.

I first laid out the initial colors after the sketch. What stood out for me is that he used warm greens for the shadows and somehow cool greens for the light parts. My initial colors are still saturated even though I already tried toning it down a bit lol. I just got used to mixing saturated colors that I often forget to have a contrast of saturated and desaturated ones.

While painting, I made sure to pay attention to what colors he used and why. I love how the dress look white even though it's not pure white. :D

Once I was done, I painted the colors used in the palette as well and wrote the title and artist. I want to be able to have some sort of catalog of my favorite paintings in one place so I'd be able to remember them. This is also a lot better than just printing them.

And this is my finished study for the painting. I didn't nail the colors and they're still a bit saturated compared to the original but it's closer to my style I guess. I really enjoyed doing this because I learned a lot of things about colors before doing this so I was able to pay attention to them more compared to before.

I love the subtle reds and they compliment the other colors so much.

I also wrote a little bit of observations and what I learned so this is quite a journal. It allows me to realize what I have learned and not just in the back of my head and that also makes me remember it better.

Also have you noticed this was Claude Monet's family? On the left is Claude Monet, the artist popular for his water lily paintings. People always confuse Manet and Monet together lol.