673) Art Book Review John Singer Sargent Portrait Drawings By Dover Library

Hello and welcome to Andrew Broussard Watercolors. Today I want to do a quick look at an art book. This is Portrait Drawings, 42 different works by John Singer Sargent and this is one of the books put out by the Dover Art Library. I've been finding a lot of these books for cheap on eBay and on Amazon. I think I bought maybe one of them new. I might have bought this one new for maybe seven dollars off of Amazon because two day shipping and I was looking at eBay and maybe it was six dollars used and I was like oh well you know I'll spend the extra dollar just so I can get it sooner and work from it. So with these videos I wanted to just show some different resources for practicing sketching and studying and I've been using this book a lot. I think I've been referencing it just so much. The paper quality and everything for this series of books isn't the best and in fact if you start looking at things on Amazon and their reviews that's usually what you'll see is maybe the plates are too small or the paper quality isn't up to the person's standards but I think for sub seven dollar book reference to kind of be hands-on with and work with art materials in your other hand and to potentially get dirty in the book I think that's fine. I think that's acceptable. Other Sargent books that I've been wanting to get my hands on seem to be in excess of twenty, thirty, forty dollars and I have a little bit of a hard time committing that much money to some books. That being said they just have like a little synopsis in the front. I haven't really looked through that. I've been more flipping through it looking at it and either sketching in charcoal pencil or kind of like the colored pencil and Conte. So with these they kind of tell you the medium and the size and the year but not for every one of them. They might have that information in here. That being said I'll kind of hone in on the more facial feature and maybe do a little bit of a looseness on the bottom and I'm just trying to adopt Mr. Sargent's approach to this and there's a lot of interesting things that he winds up doing. If you look on YouTube you'll see other people working from pictures that are shown in this book and going into detail about Mr. Sargent's approaches. And as I explore charcoal and kind of the more messy mediums things like this I really look forward to trying out. I have sketched this one so far. I was very happy with that and I find the way that he renders the mustache and the eyes and just the shape of the head was really important for me. And there's another one that I had worked from recently a few times. Let's see this one right here. I've been finding it really important to help me see the far cheek, using the hair to outline the forehead, just the gestural marks to create the hair and the soft values for skin. Later on in the book I think I had sketched this one as well. I did pencil. Well I think this was in charcoal if you look at it. That I felt was a really good study for me. Just a lot of good reference material that I could just open up and get started with. In fact the reason I'm filming this video now is because I have it in the art room near the camera and I wanted to work from one of them. I figured might as well just get this filmed for down the line. There's some older folk rendered in here. I found it a moment ago. There's older folk right here and I'm just curious how to do that and how to get the aged feel or the younger feel or the elderly feel etc. I'm excited to see how I can do that. One of the things that I kept on reading about Sargent is that he was essentially a realist and didn't romanticize the looks of people. He held true to how that person looked. I think that's important and exciting in my journey. So 10 out of 10 I would recommend this book. I've been feeling like I'm learning a lot just by sitting there and sketching it. Let me know if there's any books out there that you've been working from. Anything you recommend me picking up or any other Sargent materials because he put out hundreds of oil paintings and hundreds of charcoals and pencil sketches and this is only a small collection of so there's definitely bigger books out there. Let me know if you've come across them and what you think of them. On that note, y'all have a great day and take care. I'll talk to y'all soon.