This is probably one of the best art videos I've ever seen! I got more then just art education, like an in depth understanding of an important pillar or art.
Good to see you are putting some of the topics you talk about in your secrets of portrait painting. That dvd was easily the most valuable thing in my art collection. Buying twenty hours of one to one tuition from Cesar Santos has raised my painting to a much higher level. Keep spreading your knowledge Cesar!! Many thanks, just ordered a flesh palette t-shirt to arrive in Scotland.👍🏻👨🏻🎨🎨
Hey Cesar! would you consider live streaming some of your painting sessions on youtube? I´m sure a lot of us would love to see! (plus, you create more content! ) :D
Cesar:I just met you through Liron!! Loved that conversation. It gave me insights into things like short-term goal setting; finding your community of people (being at the bar); developing a daily practice of writing down your thoughts, among other things. I am particularly interested in learning to see values. I just read a great biography of Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson, and he talked a little about some of the things you mentioned, like how to see and paint edges, and how to teach the eye to see differences in values. Thanks, so much.
You have confirmed it: for those with glasses, taking them off once in a while might help. I stopped painting for over 20 years (due to failing eye-sight) and have just re-kindled with this passion recently. Thank you!
Awesome video- I still struggle with this but it used to be really bad. I would shade my drawings until they were basically black. I was lucky enough to go to Italy in 2018 and I forgot to bring my contact lenses, which was initially a bummer, but ended up being a blessing as I realized that every painting or drawing I saw was broken down into basically 3 values, which formed the composition. I still have a tendency to go too dark or scatter too many nuanced values, but at least I'm aware of it. Stepping away from a drawing or looking at it through a mirror is also a really helpful tip as I have an urge to push my face closer and closer to the paper while drawing because I get distracted by detail and overly immersed in the whole process. I believe the path to improving as an artist is to learn how to see. I think our brains try to trick us with preconceived iconographic ideas of what something should look like which can deter us from portraying the subject accurately, and you hit upon those points very eloquently in your video. Much respect
From my persona experience this is the most important lesson in Art and must be learned by any artist first, well before any other exercises commence. I would couple this with 60 degrees cone of vison, as both these rules work together either we want it or not.
Great information. Question and something I’d like you to try once- I lost an eye in an accident. My dominant eye. I only see out of my right eye. I then started painting. Put a piece of tape over an eye and paint a portrait. I no longer need to squint. My vision in my only eye is 20-10. I have some peripheral issues and no depth perception. I personally think I see values easier. I took a lot of classes, painted hundreds of live models. Not once was one able to understand what my set of rose colored glasses were seeing. You are a great heart. I give this gift to you , maybe you’ll paint a masterpiece. Cezar, if and I say if you can get past the initial shock Of having a change in your vision ( going to one eye) I used to shoot skeet. ( when had two eyes) With two eyes I missed frequent as vision moving changed from eye to eye it causes missing. I then put a piece of tape over my non dominant eye and I rarely shot behind the target. Try it , you’ll need to be patient and let one eye adjust but I think you are a guy that just might be open to new things.
Interesting, I never thought to take off my glasses. I’ve tried the other things you suggested. I will definitely try taking off my glasses once and a while to help with tonal values, thanks T x
great tips, slimier article changed the way i think about values but from a book, which made me reach to a conclusion because of the simultaneous contrast illusion, that one should relay on what he knows instead of what he think he sees when it comes to values, i also noticed that the majority of the tutorials whether payed or free feed us with false info and claim certain abilities more like superpowers that one should reach with practice which turned out to be superstitious and only got mentioned as a part of showing off skills that will never be practical to use or even can be practiced realistically which make art students frustrated and sometimes give up on art based on those false fundamentals which personally i suffered form and still suffering trying to get rid of old habits that i developed based on those fake fundamentals
It was a lil difficult to understand but that was such an important point I was missing thus was struggling identifying values. My eyes would focus on one thing and rest adjusted according to that💗
Master Cesar, your videos are amazing. I should really be more attentive to edges and learn how to show in my drawing how soft or hard they are using values.
Damn Cesar I love your videos and your views on how u look and perceive art and art making. I barely discovered u about two weeks ago and u inspire me. I’m 40 and have always loved making art yet never had the opportunity to get trained but I’m learning a lot from u. Please keep up the good work and maybe some day I can send a piece so u could critique it.
Great analogies and examples on how to see values. Keep up the great videos, Cesar! It continues to inspire me with my own charcoal portraits and videos. - Jeff
On this subject I HIGHLY recommend this book: Light for the artist By Ted Seth Jacobs, which is an expansion to full book length of a chapter on light from his earlier book Drawing what the eye sees. Light for the artist is still in my opinion the most comprehensive guide to the subject. It's from a painting in oils perspective and if you need to be sure the guy knows what he's talking about just Google him and look at his body of work. It's a very interesting read and well written too. I highly recommend it. If anyone gets it let me know what you think. X
This is the most difficult aspect to grasp when first learning to paint realistically. Thanks for the lesson, I want one of those shirts. Do you ship to Ireland?
Great video! i love all of your content. You are an excellent teacher and very informative. Would you ever consider doing a video on mediums or principles of oil painting, such as fat over lean? I bought your dvd a year ago and it's helped me significantly in my artist journey. Thanks again for all you do, cheers!
Squint! Set up a bunch of still lifes with different local values and study them! Remember that the cast shadow has a value that changes depending on the surface where it sits. That took me months to notice and wouldn't even noticed it if i wasn't reading about light.
@@Codswallop58 I watched the video. I was commenting about taking it to the actual practice and not just the theory behind it. Obviously, considering it. I've seen a lot of Cesar videos and I am sure he agrees with this thinking. Too much theory with no practice is worthless. For the other comment, I'm not talking about colors. I'm talking about different value steps on a grayscale. That's not basic at all when you have a very complex form casting shadows on different forms with complex local value changes without breaking the shadow/light/chiaroscuro relationship and making it flat. You need to squint because that way you see only the big values without any detail. The rest of the work is pure thinking, not trusting your eyes literally if you want a successful image.
Thanks, this was extremely interesting. There are a billion different degrees of tones technically, and the human eye can see a Thousand different ones? Wow. I really understand now why so many painters talk about the importance of tonal values. I need to work more on this. Also, I have recently been experimenting with defocusing my eyes to see things in large, general ways so that was coinciding with what you were saying about that. One thing though, I have always preferred the term Tones or Tonal Values, instead of the word Values when talking about degrees of light and dark. The word values usually refers to moral or ethics, and using that word when talking about light and dark degrees always seemed confusing to me. Tones or Tonal Values just seems to make more sense, and it also aligns more with music which painting is already closely associated with. Just a line of thought I hope you or someone else might find interesting. Incredibly helpful and interesting video though, thanks again.
Hello cesar we apresiate all of your videos but I think that you should do the same videos but in Spanish I speak English I am cuban and speak Spanish too like you. but I think that a lot people will love to see yours videos in Spanish because they doesn't speak English. And that will be even better to you youtube channel. Is just an opinion. Thank you for all your hard work!
Understanding value is rather easy actually....define the shape (positive or negative) and then determine if that shape is a 10%, a 30%, a 50% or a 70% gray tone. Ta da.
I heard you can keep control of value and color by keeping a little bit of one color in all your colors,like how an egg keeps all the ingredients together when you bake something in the oven.
That s how everyone paints basically.In a more simple way of saying,it's like adding a filter. When adding a bit of one color on all colors you re restricting your color wheel,you're making it smaller and related and that makes everything harmonious.You can do that by add ing the said "filter" or you can desaturate some colors to bring them closer. Closer colors on the color wheel are basically more harmonious.
Cesar, can you please provide a source for the article by Harkness? Amazon has the journal but the price is astronomical! All I want is a pdf of the Harkness article. Thanks much!
Great video Mr. Santos! Learned a lot from you. One question though, when you paint a more complicated painting, say with multiple figures, where do you use your central vision and where do you use your peripheral vision? Do you just pick one spot on the painting to focus on, and relate everything else to that spot? Or do you have multiple focal points throughout the painting? Thanks for answering!
So instead of what you see, you decide your range of values, and apply them in that way and not as you see them (because they shift as soon as you focus on a part)? Also - is there finally an advantage to having crap vision? I'm going to try taking off my glasses!
Thank you for giving us tips about art Mr. Santos. This video is so helpful. Could you maybe do a video about edges in painting and how to determin them? This would be awsome.
hola cesar, Me gustaría bastante ver videos tuyos en español bro, siempre veo tus videos pero me cuesta un poco el ingles para tan valiosa información la cual tú entregas. un gran abrazo desde latinoamerica!
there's a lot to learn just from your Shirt alone
I can’t see the link below that he mentions. I want to get the shirt. Help !!!
Cesar, you are an inspiration my man. Your enthusiasm for learning and creating art is contagious.
Knowing the difference between looking and seeing can take a long time to comprehend. This helps.
This was the signal most useful values tip ive ever heard.. literally helped me understand whats missing in my work
This is probably one of the best art videos I've ever seen! I got more then just art education, like an in depth understanding of an important pillar or art.
You're not just an extraordinary artist but a great teacher as well !
Brilliant presentation of seeing and interpreting values. I guess success all depends on the pupil.
Amazing, thank you man. This is critical info for painters. Its endlessly complex.
Love your fire enthusiasm and how your hands speak! Indeed value mastery is the key to realism ❤️
Good to see you are putting some of the topics you talk about in your secrets of portrait painting. That dvd was easily the most valuable thing in my art collection. Buying twenty hours of one to one tuition from Cesar Santos has raised my painting to a much higher level. Keep spreading your knowledge Cesar!! Many thanks, just ordered a flesh palette t-shirt to arrive in Scotland.👍🏻👨🏻🎨🎨
It's an awesome moment when something changes your perception.
Value stuffed me over for so long. And still does! It's good to hear you talking about it.
Hey Cesar! would you consider live streaming some of your painting sessions on youtube? I´m sure a lot of us would love to see! (plus, you create more content! ) :D
👏👏👏
I really want his dvds. When I can afford them. Seem really worth the money though.
me in public: *squinting, widening my eyes and staring off into space to see through my peripheral*
people around me: 👁👄👁💧
"Are you ok, sir?!" lol
Lovely to hear from you again as always.
Stan Miller on youtube still imo has the best video on values. I'll never forget when the penny dropped for me watching them.
Thank you so much sir for this valuable information . You are my inspiration 🙏💓
Very interesting! Great video! 👍🏻👍🏼👍🏽👍🏾👍🏿
Cesar:I just met you through Liron!! Loved that conversation. It gave me insights into things like short-term goal setting; finding your community of people (being at the bar); developing a daily practice of writing down your thoughts, among other things. I am particularly interested in learning to see values. I just read a great biography of Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson, and he talked a little about some of the things you mentioned, like how to see and paint edges, and how to teach the eye to see differences in values. Thanks, so much.
You have confirmed it: for those with glasses, taking them off once in a while might help.
I stopped painting for over 20 years (due to failing eye-sight) and have just re-kindled with this passion recently.
Thank you!
That was so incredibly helpful! Thank you!
Thank you Cesar. I remember this from school. This is a great refresher.
Very en- Lighting, thank you Cesar you are the Master!
This is your best video to date, Cesar. Thank you very much for expanding on this issue.
Awesome video- I still struggle with this but it used to be really bad. I would shade my drawings until they were basically black.
I was lucky enough to go to Italy in 2018 and I forgot to bring my contact lenses, which was initially a bummer, but ended up being a blessing as I realized that every painting or drawing I saw was broken down into basically 3 values, which formed the composition.
I still have a tendency to go too dark or scatter too many nuanced values, but at least I'm aware of it. Stepping away from a drawing or looking at it through a mirror is also a really helpful tip as I have an urge to push my face closer and closer to the paper while drawing because I get distracted by detail and overly immersed in the whole process.
I believe the path to improving as an artist is to learn how to see. I think our brains try to trick us with preconceived iconographic ideas of what something should look like which can deter us from portraying the subject accurately, and you hit upon those points very eloquently in your video.
Much respect
From my persona experience this is the most important
lesson in Art and must be learned by any artist first, well before any other exercises
commence. I would couple this with 60 degrees cone of vison, as both these
rules work together either we want it or not.
Watching this video was my most valuable use of 5 minutes and 11 seconds today!!! Thanks Cesar :)
Thank you for such unique wisdom! Love it!
you added value to my day
That is a GREAT article, read it. So helpful. Thanks for addressing it! Good summary.
Black mirror is so helpful.( Like a Claude glass.)
Great information. Question and something I’d like you to try once- I lost an eye in an accident. My dominant eye. I only see out of my right eye. I then started painting. Put a piece of tape over an eye and paint a portrait.
I no longer need to squint. My vision in my only eye is 20-10. I have some peripheral issues and no depth perception. I personally think I see values easier.
I took a lot of classes, painted hundreds of live models. Not once was one able to understand what my set of rose colored glasses were seeing.
You are a great heart. I give this gift to you , maybe you’ll paint a masterpiece. Cezar, if and I say if you can get past the initial shock
Of having a change in your vision ( going to one eye)
I used to shoot skeet. ( when had two eyes)
With two eyes I missed frequent as vision moving changed from eye to eye it causes missing. I then put a piece of tape over my non dominant eye and I rarely shot behind the target.
Try it , you’ll need to be patient and let one eye adjust but I think you are a guy that just might be open to new things.
I finally had to go get glasses and I swear they've helped me soften my edges, they look totally different! Glasses are game changers!LOL...
Thank you, Cesar Santos!
Interesting, I never thought to take off my glasses. I’ve tried the other things you suggested. I will definitely try taking off my glasses once and a while to help with tonal values, thanks T x
great tips, slimier article changed the way i think about values but from a book, which made me reach to a conclusion because of the simultaneous contrast illusion, that one should relay on what he knows instead of what he think he sees when it comes to values,
i also noticed that the majority of the tutorials whether payed or free feed us with false info and claim certain abilities more like superpowers that one should reach with practice which turned out to be superstitious and only got mentioned as a part of showing off skills that will never be practical to use or even can be practiced realistically which make art students frustrated and sometimes give up on art based on those false fundamentals which personally i suffered form and still suffering trying to get rid of old habits that i developed based on those fake fundamentals
Valuable info. Thank you. Enjoy your videos and your way of looking at art. Great artist and great rapper
Brilliant video, thanks
It was a lil difficult to understand but that was such an important point I was missing thus was struggling identifying values. My eyes would focus on one thing and rest adjusted according to that💗
this video is Gold.
Eres grande, César
What a great, insightful video. Thank you!
Спасибо вам за ваш энтузиазм!
great explanation man! short and to the POINT! Thank You!!!
Thank you Cesar for this very informative video!!!
Thankyou💖💖
That was awesome!! Thank Yo!
Thank you Cesar! Important topic, great video!
Nene chulo, que Dios te me bendiga 😍😁🇵🇷
Excellent explanation, thank you so much!👏💜👏💜❤️
Master Cesar, your videos are amazing. I should really be more attentive to edges and learn how to show in my drawing how soft or hard they are using values.
Damn Cesar I love your videos and your views on how u look and perceive art and art making. I barely discovered u about two weeks ago and u inspire me. I’m 40 and have always loved making art yet never had the opportunity to get trained but I’m learning a lot from u. Please keep up the good work and maybe some day I can send a piece so u could critique it.
what a cool dude! thanks a lot for sharing this, really good and detailed explanation! ill be sure to check out the article
Very good lesson
Thanks! Yes getting value right is difficult especially when one is trying to do a real fast but finished painting like in acrylics...
love it
I WANT this shirt !
Interesting! Thanks for such a great explanation! New subscriber! Looking forward to seeing more.
Thanks for sharing master cesar
Thank you so much!! I’ve been dealing with this issue and this helps to put this in context so much!
thank you for the tutorial, you are the best!!!
I found Mark Carder's DIY colour checker helped me immensely in isolate the correct value, hue and chroma of a colour.
Love your art ❤
Brilliant information to help artists starting out, thank you Cesar. Really enjoyed this video. :-)
Good information Cesar! Thank you!
Really useful video!
Very nice explained
❤❤❤❤❤❤❤
Great advice 🙏
Ahaha... So funny face and beard...😂😂😂 and accent!!!
Ok, I finally understand why I notice myself squinting all the time when drawing... btw, mind-blown
Muchas gracias.
so helpful,thanks Maestro
Great analogies and examples on how to see values. Keep up the great videos, Cesar! It continues to inspire me with my own charcoal portraits and videos. - Jeff
On this subject I HIGHLY recommend this book: Light for the artist By Ted Seth Jacobs, which is an expansion to full book length of a chapter on light from his earlier book Drawing what the eye sees. Light for the artist is still in my opinion the most comprehensive guide to the subject. It's from a painting in oils perspective and if you need to be sure the guy knows what he's talking about just Google him and look at his body of work. It's a very interesting read and well written too. I highly recommend it. If anyone gets it let me know what you think. X
Oh, I see!! That makes a lot of sense - and understanding the values so much clearer! A large penny just dropped... Thanks Cesar! :)
If you don't know how to throw your vision out of focus, you can look through glasses that aren't yours. Everything will look blurry.
Yes! Yes! YEs, thanks
Thank you for the information
Thank you, that was helpful!
donde puedo encontrar el articulo para leerlo?
Where can I find the article to read it?
This is the most difficult aspect to grasp when first learning to paint realistically. Thanks for the lesson, I want one of those shirts. Do you ship to Ireland?
Thank you
Thank you!
You are genius
Great video! i love all of your content. You are an excellent teacher and very informative. Would you ever consider doing a video on mediums or principles of oil painting, such as fat over lean? I bought your dvd a year ago and it's helped me significantly in my artist journey. Thanks again for all you do, cheers!
I tried removing my glasses!hahaha i can see the values...thanks!
starts @3:59
Squint! Set up a bunch of still lifes with different local values and study them! Remember that the cast shadow has a value that changes depending on the surface where it sits. That took me months to notice and wouldn't even noticed it if i wasn't reading about light.
I hate it when people comment without watching the video
@@Codswallop58 I watched the video. I was commenting about taking it to the actual practice and not just the theory behind it.
Obviously, considering it. I've seen a lot of Cesar videos and I am sure he agrees with this thinking. Too much theory with no practice is worthless.
For the other comment, I'm not talking about colors. I'm talking about different value steps on a grayscale. That's not basic at all when you have a very complex form casting shadows on different forms with complex local value changes without breaking the shadow/light/chiaroscuro relationship and making it flat.
You need to squint because that way you see only the big values without any detail. The rest of the work is pure thinking, not trusting your eyes literally if you want a successful image.
I was telling my girlfriend about this today! I'll send her this video, I'm sure she will understand better.
Thanks, this was extremely interesting. There are a billion different degrees of tones technically, and the human eye can see a Thousand different ones? Wow. I really understand now why so many painters talk about the importance of tonal values. I need to work more on this.
Also, I have recently been experimenting with defocusing my eyes to see things in large, general ways so that was coinciding with what you were saying about that. One thing though, I have always preferred the term Tones or Tonal Values, instead of the word Values when talking about degrees of light and dark. The word values usually refers to moral or ethics, and using that word when talking about light and dark degrees always seemed confusing to me. Tones or Tonal Values just seems to make more sense, and it also aligns more with music which painting is already closely associated with. Just a line of thought I hope you or someone else might find interesting. Incredibly helpful and interesting video though, thanks again.
Did u do that flower in the left hand corner? I saw that all over Miami when I lived there
Hello cesar we apresiate all of your videos but I think that you should do the same videos but in Spanish I speak English I am cuban and speak Spanish too like you. but I think that a lot people will love to see yours videos in Spanish because they doesn't speak English. And that will be even better to you youtube channel. Is just an opinion. Thank you for all your hard work!
Understanding value is rather easy actually....define the shape (positive or negative) and then determine if that shape is a 10%, a 30%, a 50% or a 70% gray tone. Ta da.
I heard you can keep control of value and color by keeping a little bit of one color in all your colors,like how an egg keeps all the ingredients together when you bake something in the oven.
That s how everyone paints basically.In a more simple way of saying,it's like adding a filter.
When adding a bit of one color on all colors you re restricting your color wheel,you're making it smaller and related and that makes everything harmonious.You can do that by add ing the said "filter" or you can desaturate some colors to bring them closer.
Closer colors on the color wheel are basically more harmonious.
very interesting m8. keep up :)
Cesar, can you please provide a source for the article by Harkness? Amazon has the journal but the price is astronomical! All I want is a pdf of the Harkness article. Thanks much!
Me2
Great video Mr. Santos! Learned a lot from you. One question though, when you paint a more complicated painting, say with multiple figures, where do you use your central vision and where do you use your peripheral vision? Do you just pick one spot on the painting to focus on, and relate everything else to that spot? Or do you have multiple focal points throughout the painting? Thanks for answering!
You can do any of those options, but one area has to dominate in relationships to other areas
So instead of what you see, you decide your range of values, and apply them in that way and not as you see them (because they shift as soon as you focus on a part)?
Also - is there finally an advantage to having crap vision? I'm going to try taking off my glasses!
Thank you for giving us tips about art Mr. Santos. This video is so helpful. Could you maybe do a video about edges in painting and how to determin them? This would be awsome.
hola cesar, Me gustaría bastante ver videos tuyos en español bro, siempre veo tus videos pero me cuesta un poco el ingles para tan valiosa información la cual tú entregas. un gran abrazo desde latinoamerica!