Stylized Portraits Inspired by Amedeo Modigliani

1. Introduction: Hi. My name's Elizabeth and welcome to my Artist Inspired series class about Amadeo Modigliani. I am a professional artist and art educator, as well as a published author illustrator and I've been teaching classes here on Skillshare since 2021. I have a bunch of classes that explore a wide range of art making approaches and I have my artist series class. In classes like this, we get inspired by the life and art of an artist from the past or present, and then we explore art making inspired by what we've learned about so this provides us a unique opportunity to look at their journey, their development, different aspects of their art making, and use that and put it through our own aesthetic and into our own art lens to help us continue to grow as artists. In this class, we're looking at the amazing art background of Amadeo Modigliani. Modigliani is best known for his elongated neck portraits. He was also a sculptor for a period of years and we can see elements of the way that he treated the figure in his very stylized approach as he emerged different elements of art and art history that he really found inspiring. Modigliani had a very short life, but in that span of time, he created many works of art that we can draw inspiration from in a variety of ways. We can look at his use of color, we can look at his stylized nature of depicting the male and female form. We can look at his two dimensional paintings or his three dimensional sculptures. In this class, we are going to be exploring all of those aspects of Modigliani's we find ones that we want to play with in our own art making approach. Let's head it over and talk some more about our class project. I'll see you there. 2. Class Project: For the class project, we are going to be looking at ways that we can stylize portraiture. We are going to be looking at the way that Modigliani played with really beautiful lines, elongated forms, and the way that he was leaning into inspiration of primitivism, as well as some of the more classical approaches to art making. Modigliani was all about taking things down to a very simple approach to both the sketches that he would make, his study of values, the lights and the dark, so the shading of the sketches and then ultimately the paintings that he would create. For our class project, I'm going to demonstrate how I am using acrylic paint and sketching out a very simplified form. Then we're going to talk about the way that we can easily manipulate acrylic paint to get some very subtle, beautiful gradations a Modigliani. Let's head over to our next lesson to talk about what materials you're going to want to have on hand for class. I'll see you there. 3. Materials: For our Amadeo Medigliani inspired artwork, we are going to be leaning into acrylic paint. So I have my acrylic paint. I've got a variety of brushes. I'm going to be working relatively small. So I grabbed a couple of flat ones and a round one. I've got other brushes on hand that I can grab too, but things smaller because we're going to want to play with building up our portraits inspired by Modigliani's portraiture, his painted portraiture. So then because we're working with acrylic, we're going to want to have a jar or a glass of water for when we clean our brushes and a cloth to dry them. Then you can work with any color background you want to. When I taught this class in person, we worked on construction paper because I really wanted to start with that neutral gray background. I have a bunch of this on hand. I cut it in half and we were pretty small. You could absolutely work larger if you want to. You can also work on white paper, black paper, any other color paper that you want. If you're going to go for a paper painting, make sure that you choose a mixed media paper or even a watercolor paper just so you have a little bit more thickness so it can take the acrylic paint. The construction paper does fine with the acrylic paint. We're not going to build up crazy heavy textures, so it'll be totally. Going to want to sketch out your portrait in advance. So you're going to want a pencil and eraser so that you can lightly plan out your portrait artwork before you begin painting. Let's gather up our art supplies, and then we'll head on over to our next lesson to learn about the life and art of Amadeo Medigliani. I'll see you there. 4. About Amedeo Modigliani: Amadio Madigliani is a very interesting character. He had a fairly tragic life. We think of the tortured artist, and he pretty much fits that to a t. He began his life at an early stage where his family was in financial ruin. They had a lot of struggles when he was growing up. Then on top of that, he had a lot of health issues, both in his early years and later on as well. But like many artists who suffer extended periods of illness or issues with their health, they lean into art and Motigliani did that as well. He began learning art from a very young age from his mother and he continued to learn it during one of the periods of time where he was ill and unable to attend school for long stretches of time and was learning from home. He dreamed of traveling to Italy. He really wanted to go and see the works of the master artist in person. When he became well enough as a young man, he ventured off and began exploring and gobbling up inspiration all across Europe, especially in Italy and really taking all of these aspects of the artists that were works that he could go visit in museums and the artists that he would be able to meet and connect with on the streets of Paris, taking all of that in as he began to flourish in his own art making. He has some similarities to Picasso. Picasso was very interested in primitivism, the art of primitive cultures that Picasso, like Modigliani were exposed to through museums, having collections that including artists could go see and then take those inspirations back to the studio and explore that in their own way, much like we're doing in the artist series classes. He was leaning into some of the same elements of the primitive masks were coming to Europe and being put on display from different cultures. It's really interesting because we can see a parallel between the way he simplified, especially the face for many of his paintings and how that was then translated both in his paintings, as well as in his sculptures. Modigliani was very interested in stylizing. He did not want to replicate the people that sat for him and he did do direct observation. He had a model sitting and then he would paint him or her, but he would do it in his own way. He would elongate the neck for an elegance and simplify the face and it would have very subtle shifts of curved lines that would define different aspects of his figures. He did some really fantastic work. Plays on intentionally trying to portray the character of the person through the painting, which is interesting because the eyes are often ones that he didn't paint in. He left those as a solid color or textured oval. There are ways that he depersonalized the portraits, but he was also putting the essence of the person into them. It's this really fun play of those things. He continued to have a tragic life. He really wanted to be a successful artist. He had this idea had to be theatrical and be over the top in order to be creative. He felt like he needed this very dramatized life to generate the inspiration for his art and ultimately self sabotaged himself in a lot of ways through substance abuse and different lifestyle choices that caused him to have a short life in the end. He was very passionate about art making and very passionate about painting and truly was trying to have a way of generating a lot of inspiration and a lot of creative energy that he could then pour out in his paintings and his sculptures, unfortunately, it backfired and tragically caused him to not survive for long life. But the work that he left behind is incredibly inspiring. I love his use of colors and we can see some expressive brushstrokes, even though his palettes are fairly limited, we can see a lot of intention behind how he treated the figures and how he stylized them and the figure in relation to the background, we can have a lot of fun finding ways that we can take all of this and interpret it into our own portrayal of the figure and stylizing it. More information about Madam Modigliani and his life and many pictures of his art, both paintings and sculptures. There's a Google Science presentation on the projects and resources section of class that is a great resource to help you really start to see all of the amazing ways that he was exploring art and there's a lot of information in there about where he was drawing influence from for his creativity and a lot about his life too. Definitely check that out before you dive into sketching your stylized portraits. But when you're ready, meet me in the next lesson and I will walk you through how I am doing some simplified stylized portrait sketching to set myself up for portrait painting success. Him the next lesson real soon. 5. Sketching Stylized Portraits: The first step to creating our Modigliani stylized portrait is to sketch out our portrait image. You are welcome to use references of Modigliani's work as a guideline. You can also look at a reference of any portrait that you like as you approach this. I am doing my painting on construction paper, so I've got the piece of construction paper cut to the size that I want. This is a nine by six, big enough so that I didn't have to do teeny tiny features. So now I'm going to lightly sketch out my portrait. I'm leaning into more simplified shapes, a Modigliani and a very elongated neck because that is one of the aspects of portraiture that he really leaned into. His very elegant elongated necks. So I started with a basic perve for the jaw line and then this long neck. And then I'm keeping the facial features relatively simple. What I'm going to end up doing when I get to the next lesson where I'm painting this, I am going to paint in big blocks of color and then kind of layer in a little bit of shading. There's not a ton of shading that's happening in Modigliani's work to create depth and dimension in three dimensional form. In the faces themselves, it's relatively flat with some subtle values here and there. So I just need the basic shapes to get my portrait onto my paper. With an elongated neck, you want to make sure that you give it the rest of the body and then just kind of have it go off the page. I'm not really worrying about necessarily correct proportions because we know we're distorting them and stylizing them I love the way that Modigliani is kind of playing with different ways that he addresses hair and hats with his figures. So I'm kind of leaning into some very simple basic lines to create the shapes that I want to. I want to make sure that this is really easy to paint. I don't want that to be a stumbling block for approaching his style. But I also want to do it with my own aesthetic. So this is a little bit of me and a little bit of Modigliani as far as how I laid out my stylized portrait. Just kind of refining some things and kind of figuring it out. But this is really all that you need for your portrait. As you kind of start to stylize and sketch out your portrait, you'll start to figure out what shapes do you need to have your portrait make sense on the paper. And really, like I said, you can really lean into his artwork as a reference, but I really encourage you to not just replicate his portraits, really kind of put your own spin on it a little bit, really trying to play around with how you can personalize and stylize your own portrait here. Also, think about the background. You could leave it flat or you could put some other basic shapes in there. I just did a couple lines so that I could do a little bit more play with different color and value to pop her off the background. Have some fun sketching out your portrait, and then when you're all done, meet me in the next lesson, and I'll start showing you how I'm approaching painting my stylized Modigliani portrait. See you soon. 6. Painting Portraits Part 1: Gigliani painting, think about what color schemes you want to play with. Do you want to lean into more realistic colors? Do you want to do more non realistic fantasy? Do you want to do a limited color palette? He was leaning into fairly traditional color palettes. So a lot of the color schemes that you'll see in his paintings are ones that involve a lot of blues and a lot of natural colors, browns and tans, beiges, a lot of grays. You can kind of play with any way you want to. For the skin, I'm kind of doing a mix of a basic color and then playing around with different lights and darks of that. I'm sort of kind of blending and shading as I go. I really want it to be subtle. I don't want to have a fully realized three dimensional painted portrait. I want to have it continue the stylization. You'll also notice that I'm painting over some aspects of my drawing. So I know that the lips and the eyes are going to be different colors from the color that I've chosen for the skin. But as far as, like, the nose goes and that stuff, I'm just kind of painting over my sketch marks, and that's okay. It's okay to let those go, and then we can kind of bring them back in as we paint. And then I'm kind of sort of leaning into a basic understanding about which parts of the face are lighter than others. I do want a little bit of dimension, kind of like Modigliani was working with. I also want a little bit of flatness, too. So you could do this in a couple of ways. You could paint everything flat and do kind of a base flat coat of color and then layer on top of that some more nuance for your lights and darks, or you could do like I am and kind of gradually put the values in a little bit of subtlety here and there as you go. I'm trying to make sure that I stay inside my lines so that it's a little easier to kind of navigate that later, but I have a solid sketch to work with, and I'm working in sections. So I'm going to do all of the skin tone, and then I'm going to kind of move on to the next color and the next color. If you're going to do it in layers, just kind of do one section that's all the same color, and then while that dries, you can move on to another area. So here is where I'm talking about blending it on the paper while it's still wet. So I kind of put down a base color. I didn't worry about it being all the same value because I knew I was going to do some shading. Then I mix up a little bit darker version of that color, and I start to kind of put in where there's some darks to kind of create the roundness to the face. So the basic sense of this is our heads are ovals, and we know that it's going to be a little bit darker on the sides, and then it's going to lighten as it comes toward the front. So at this point, I'm really treating it like a very smooth oval that has roundness to it. That's kind of the basics of the shading. And then I'm going to jump down to the neck and I'm going to kind of put in some of my base color for that. And kind of work back and forth between the two. The neck is a cylinder. So the lighter portion is going to be at the center, the darker parts are going to be at the sides, and then you can kind of blend those two together. You could do a lot with, like, glazing, more of an approach. You could do a base coat, and then you could play a lot with your color transparency using water to thin your paint to do your shading that way. That's also a really great approach. I wanted to kind of just go for it. Plus, I just really love blending my paint while it's wet on the paper or the canvas. And this part's a great example of that. I'm putting in a lot of light, and then I'm going back and forth between my wet darker color and my wet lighter color and kind of blending back and forth between the two of those. If you find that one or the other is taking over more dominance, you can always wash your brush off or just wipe it off so it doesn't get wet and then just kind of pull off some of the extra light color and then continue to blend on the paper. It's really just kind of a back and forth play between the two values or as many more values as you're working with at one time. Again, I want a really subtle value scale here. I really want subtle value. So I'm really not going extreme. I've got a light and I've got a dark, and I'm working between those two. And then I'm just going to keep going. I'm going to add in the ears. I'm not getting terribly intricate. I'm keeping it pretty simple. I just want to allude to dimension in this aspect of my painting. The next step is to start painting in the specific facial features. So I like to start each of these with kind of a base color similar to how we handle the skin, and then I can kind of go in with more value and color to define the forms. So base color for the lips, and then I'm going to gradually start putting in sections and little bits where I'm going to define the upper lip from the lower lip. And really kind of loosely allude to details of the mouth for the hat. This one, again, I'm going to go in with just a nice base color. I wanted to have some nice contrast. So I chose black for the hat, and I'm just painting flat black. And then, while that's still a bit wet, I'm going to go in and add in some highlights with white so that I get a little bit of dimension. I want to allude to three dimensional form without getting too particular about detailed shading and intricate for the hair, I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to start with just a nice flat color, even coverage, and then kind of decide if I want to add any depth or dimension or texture to it. Modigliani portraits have a mix of it. So sometimes there's texture in the hair that can be created by using visible breast strokes, value changes, color changes. And sometimes they're just kept very simple and minimalist as far as how much attention he gives them. As I'm doing a lighter color for the hair, I can really lean into my darks to kind of push the hair that's falling on the back of the head further back and push the face forward by just doing some very basic value scales. So I'm just kind of dropping in some dark along the edges of the face and the sides of the neck and then kind of fading that out as I blend that into the brown that I've already got down. This works because my paint is still wet. But then you'll also see me kind of mute that a little bit by going back over the black with brown. So you can play with the order that you put your colors to create your different values. And you can decide how far you want to take this as far as how much shading you want to add. But I really enjoy just the subtle bit of value to kind of help place things in space and kind of define the head from the hair. This also works really great because the darkness of the hair is in contrast to the bright lightness of the face. It's pushing the face forward and pushing the hair back. Creating emphasis on the face. Next step was to paint her shirt or her dress. I wanted to continue with the idea of contrast between the brightness of her face and the darkness of what's surrounding her. I also wanted to play with color schemes that were common in Modigliani's work. Plus, I just also really like blue. So again, I'm starting with a base color. I'm starting with a darker color of the value that I want. And then I'm going to add a little bit of dark just to kind of help define and allude to the three dimensional form that is her body. You could really play with anything you want at this point in your portrait. You could add, you know, pattern, you could add design details. You could really get as detailed and specific as you want to and as stylized as you like. I wanted to play with value and basic color and just very soft illusion of depth. I also really like texture when I'm working with acrylic paint. So this was a part where I could kind of play around going back and forth between light and dark, kind of refining the shape of her shoulders and the neckline. And then I can also, you know, have some more expressive brushstrokes with the lightness, and then I can kind of go in with my dark to kind of blend it a little bit more and kind of clean it up so that it still feels unified within my portrait, but it is also reading as a different type of material. Next step is painting in the eyes. You can do this a couple of different ways. Modigliani also did this a couple of different ways. So in some of his portraits, he kept them as fairly flat colored basic shapes. In other ones, he actually defined the iris and the pupil. So I decided to lean into just the flat almond shape for mine. I also decided to go in with blue and kind of have that mirror the color of her shirt. But as I went into this, I realized that that was just was much too bright. I could have left it like this. There are ones where Modigliani had brighter, lighter colors for the eye shape. But for me personally, I just felt like I wanted them to feel more recessed into the head. So I went over the top of this light bright blue with a darker blue. 7. Portrait Painting Part 2: Next, I'm going to paint the background. I really like the way that Modigliani played with value and kind of value contrast, but in some very subtle ways. So I'm still leaning into a limited color palette. I'm kind of drawing on blues and then neutral grays and kind of figuring out what color is going to best fit my background as I go. So I'm initially starting with the light blue, and then I decided to make it darker, and I'm kind of really intuitively figuring out my colors as I work through this piece, because when the piece was painted against the neutral lightness of the construction paper, it had one appearance, but I really wanted to paint the background as well so that I was following through on a fully painted surface. So now I'm kind of playing with the idea of color and color relationships and color values to figure out what type of background is going to work best to highlight the figure that I've created and not compete with it. Which is why I'm kind of lightening and darkening and kind of playing with a lot while the paint is wet. So I went in with a light blue, and then I went in with a more true blue, and now I'm kind of pulling back the value of that blue by layering in white and doing a lot of mixing on the paper. What this is giving me is some very, like, kind of playful brush strokes and value shifts. I like paint for paint's sake, and that's something that I think we see a lot of in Modigliani's work. So kind of leaning into the fact of what happens when you paint wet paint onto wet paint and how do those two layers of paint interact? Like, the more you paint into it, the more they're going to mix and kind of flatten out. But if you leave it there and kind of let it sit in its unfinished state, then you get some really lovely brush strokes and marks and textures. That's kind of what I'm going for here as I figure out what colors and values do I need to have in my background. I also broke my background up in a couple of different basic geometric lines to create different shapes, some interesting ways to kind of break up the space behind my figure because I didn't necessarily want to have one flat wall behind her. Now I'm leaning into more of the neutrals, but it's all part of the experimentation and kind of leaning into the process and seeing what happens as I play and explore with color mixing and color relationships and being very much in the moment for painting the background. So the final step, I really wanted to bring back the definition of the nose because I had painted over that when I painted the rest of the face, and that was fairly intentional. It's just kind of easier to get the basic skin tone and values and shapes in there, and then keep it pretty subtle when you go in to define facial features that aren't, you know, eyes and mouth. For this one, a great way to do it with acrylic is to kind of especially if it's a hard edge like this, like her nose is kind of painted on the side angle because we're simplifying it down. So I just did the shape of the nose for how I wanted it, and then I kind of dragged the paint over. And this is a chance for me to kind of pull in some highlights and put in some shadows, add a little bit more peachiness and kind of warm up, you know, warm it up, freshen it up, and just kind of on top of that initial layer of paint, add a little bit more in there. There's a lot that kind of the back and forth that happens with acrylic paint. You can also kind of get your base color in and then you can clean your brush off and you can kind of drag that color over and do more of a glazing effect. But really, what I want here is I want to have kind of a crisp edge and have the nose create a shadow for the right side of my image. And then just kind of start to play with just kind of a little bit more dusting of darks to define the dimension of the face a little bit more. It's very easy to get carried away with this step. So just go subtle, start with small bits of paint and kind of play with putting in your darks and kind of fading those in. And then you can see here I'm putting in the lights. So I'm really kind of popping the nose forward by brightening that up and then just kind of going back and forth and just kind of getting everything to blend out a little bit more. Modigliani, we saw the breaststroke. Like, we see the paint. We see where values kind of meet. So it's totally okay to have that be part of your painting process, too, which is great. It gives us a chance to play and explore without trying to get a very smooth gradation of values. We can have things be a little bit more patchy and kind of play around a bit. If you kind of block them in, then with a dry brush, you can kind of go back and forth between them and get those darks and lights to merge together in the middle without just moving around a bunch of paint on the surface. So don't be intimidated by this step of the portrait. Like, this can be a really fun process, but I know that it can be a little intimidating if you're newer to acrylic or newer to doing portraits. But remember, we're going for stylized. So have fun with this. Like, lean into the paint and the value and the color and the brush strokes and just play and no matter what happens, it's going to be an amazing art experience that's going to help you grow. And that's the goal. So the same thing that I did for the skin on my portrait, I'm going to go in and I'm going to kind of pop some more darks for my lips. So I have that base color. I have some of the brush strokes, and then I'm going to go with a very small brush, and I'm going to kind of create the lines that are going to be where I'm going to have the darkness. And then I'm going to kind of fade out those dark values and kind of blend them into the base color. And it's going to give the illusion of a more three dimensional mouth. This is a step you wouldn't have to do. I totally could have stopped at how I had it before. But as I brought more values and more definition to the face as a whole, I kind of wanted to play with bringing the lips out more and having those kind of be a more intense part of the colors for the painting. So I started with my darks and map those in. Now I'm going in with my lights, and it's just that back and forth of value until you get the effect that you want. And then I'm doing the same thing. I'm kind of, like, now I'm refining the nose just a little bit more with a smaller brush. And there isn't a lot of linework in Modigliani's pieces. Like, there is and there isn't this is where I'm kind of What do I need to add for my own painting so that I really love it all the more. So I kind of wanted a little more definition for the neck, a little more definition for where the ears coming off the head, a little bit more definition for the line of the nose and kind of playing into just, like, some dusting of paint lines. So really subtle linework that just kind of helped define what's going on. Then we're adding a little bit of shadow also around the upper left side where the hat is on top of the head. And then just kind of using a clean, relatively dry brush to kind of fade those out pretty quickly. So just more subtle variation and a little bit more intense quality to my shading. And then I'm doing the same thing by just kind of defining the brow. I'm not putting in eyebrows. I'm not getting intricate with hair in any way, shape, or form. I'm just This is very much like the masks that Modigliani sculpted. I just want to have some linework and some shadow that defines where the browbone is above the eyeball and that kind of and then helping it to, like, sink back between the highest point of the brow bone and where the eyeball starts. So it's just a little bit of further facial definition that I felt like it needed just to really finish off this portrait. And I love how this turned out. Like, I'm so incredibly excited by my stylized portraits, and I'm very excited to make some more and kind of create other characters that might live in a land of Modigliani painted people. So I hope you are also excited to paint your portrait. Let's send it over to our last lesson, and we'll wrap up the class. See you there. 8. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for joining me in this artist inspired series class about Amadeo Modigliani and his amazing paintings and sculptures. I had so much fun creating my stylized portrait, and I have a feeling that the play of color and the subtle values and the stylized nature that I pulled from Modigliani's work to inform my own is going to be something that I carry with me in my art journey for a long time. I love to find new ways to approach different subject matter. This class was a really great opportunity to look at the way that Modigliani created his own way to portray figures and represent different characters through his paintings and sculptures. I can't wait to see what you created. You can pop on over to the Projects and Resources section of class to the student gallery, and you can upload photos of your project. It'd be great to see some different photos in process along the way. I love seeing the journey that an artwork takes as an artist navigates the waters of creativity and inspiration. Can upload as many pictures as you like and add different texts to help create some context to the project and the artwork that you're creating. You can also go back and edit your project anytime. If you circle back to this or you find this popping up in other art that you are creating, you can absolutely add those to your project to expand what you're sharing about the inspiration that you're getting from Modigliani's. You had a chance to do that? I would love it if you'd pop over and leave a review. Reviews are a great way to share both your thoughts about the class with me to help me improve what I'm creating for you in future classes, as well as to share your thoughts from the student perspective with others. Reviews are something that I look to these days to really figure out how am I going to decide how I spend my time? Don't have unlimited time, unfortunately. We often have to find ways to filter things down to help us figure out how we want to spend our time. When it comes to classes online, I like to see what the students are saying in other classes and use that to help and inform me about the class to see if it's something that I should take on at that stage of my artistic journey. This has been fantastic. I've loved connecting with you in the artist inspired series classes. There are many more coming up and there are many previous ones you can explore if you're new to following me and this approach to art making, getting inspired by artists past and present. Thank you so much for connecting here on Skillshare. You can hit the Follow button below if you want to get notified about future classes and feel free to also connect with me out on Instagram and YouTube where I share my art journey, art adventures I'm going on, what's going on in the studio, what I'm up to in the world of art. There's some fun stuff coming up, especially as I get ready for summer art mode. Again for taking this class and I hope we're seeing another one real soon till next time.