Back when I attended art school at the American Academy of Art I would regularly go the the Chicago Art Institute and I would see artists at the museum in front of a painting and copying the painting as best they could. I always thought it was kind of weird that they were copying and kind of felt back then that this was cheating. Since then and after I graduated from art school I learned that it was beneficial to learning how an artists had worked if you study a masters work and then you try and paint their exact  painting.

The lesson this week is to find a great artist that you admire and hope to paint like some day and fine a piece you love of theirs and then copy it. Try and paint it to look exactly like the masters work. I have done this a few times in the last month and I can tell you that it helped me out a great deal.

I'm not saying that you should copy an artists work and then say it is your own work, that is copyright infringement. Copying to learn is a way to advance your talents and it was a way that many great masters did when they were first starting out. After finishing that lesson you label those painting exercises as copies and give the master the credit for creating that work.

 

Below you can see one of the paintings I copied from a contemporary master "Alvaro Castagnet" 
I loved the looseness of his style and I wanted to see how he handles that in his painting and by trying it by copying his painting it gave me a good idea how to simplify the painting.