Getting In Touch with Leyendecker



Paint study #3 and the first one I've done using oil paint in a long awhile. The purpose of this painting, other than to break out the paints again, was to look at the way J.C. Leyendecker painted and to try his technique.

J.C. Leyendecker and his brother Frank Leyendecker were very much celebrities of the illustration era. They both studied traditionally and attended school in Paris for a year. They didn't use photo reference at all, instead they would do paint studies with a model and later paint it into the illustration. J.C. Was the more famous of the two and was known especially for his Saturday Evening Post covers and multiple ad campaigns. He is more than worth a few minutes to do some research.

Anyway, after looking over his pieces and reading a rather fantastic blog post (Link) about his process I (with the help of a second pair of eyes) summarized how he did it so that I could apply it.
Leyendecker worked shadows in with a thin turp/ paint mixture (warm shadows) and then worked up the highlights in layers of paint getting thicker the lighter it got. Kind of like adding an actual thickness of the paint for dimension. On the light side of the skin he wasn't afraid to use a lot of cool colors or bright slick highlights.

Overall in my paint study I didn't keep it strictly what Leyendecker would have done but I'm pretty happy with the results.
Stock used- Link

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