Copying a Rubens drawing

My other posts on topics related to technical art history:
  Copying a Rubens painting (materials, techniques)

Inspired by Rubens (Getty Museum page, featuring my work)

Preparing to draw (from 1400s-1700s treatises)
Hatching and shading (from 1400s-1700s treatises)

English translations of drawing treatises (Goeree, de Piles, Jombert) 

 1400s-1700s drawing treatises online
 Painting materials of Rubens, with bibliography
 Renaissance woodcut tools
 Image gallery: my copies and reconstructions

(for more photos of my copies and process see this Getty Museum page where I was featured)

Copy after Rubens.  Original HERE

The "Man in Korean Costume" was on display at the Getty at a beautiful exhibition called Looking East: Rubens's Encounter with Asia.  I started copying the drawing to scale directly from the original at the gallery, but soon realised that the details of this piece are so minute they can only be seen with a magnifying glass, so I ended up copying it from the Getty's very helpful zoom view page.  Afterwards I took the drawing back to the gallery, put it side by side with the original, corrected some value relationships, added accents and other details.

1) marking the position of the figure with willow charcoal (mostly removed in step 2)
2) blocking in the main contours and flat areas of shadow with my black chalk substitute
(compressed charcoal) and black chalk
3) finishing the drawing with details, cross-hatching, red chalk and dark accents

The use of willow or vine charcoal for the first few lines of the underdrawing (that was later removed with an eraser made of bread) is historic practice.  The 1634 Third Book of "The Mysteries of Nature and Art" says that when you finish your sketch with ash, sallow or beech charcoal and "you can finde no great fault in it: wipe it over gently with your wing, so that you may perceive the former strokes then with your blacke chalke, or blacke lead plummets; draw it as perfectly, and as curiously as you can" (p104).  The book is downloadable HERE.
A similar procedure is described in Cennini, in Willem Goeree's treatise of 1668, Gerard de Lairesse's treatise of 1701 (in French HERE), and many others (see my Online drawing treatises directory) Rubens, being a genius draughtsman, probably didn't resort to a charcoal underdrawing, but since it's convenient, historic, and doesn't affect the final look, I used it (after writing this blog I heard from Nancy Yocco, a conservator at the Getty who confirmed not noticing traces of charcoal in Rubens drawings she studied).
My real departure from the historic materials in this copy was in the use of a hard compressed charcoal pencil in conjunction with black chalk. 

Types of drawing media used by Rubens and other Baroque artists.
(Elba sanguine from Zecchi and Ural sanguine from Rublevskaya palitra,
French black chalk and Champagne white chalk from Kremer)

***

Rubens used only black and red chalk in the "Man in Korean Costume".  Examples of his use of more drawing media are the portraits of Isabella Brant and Nicolaas Rubens.  The originals are "aux trois crayons" (black red and white chalk on cream paper) drawings with pen and ink accents. For another one of my aux trois crayons with ink copies see this blog post http://lalaragimov.blogspot.com/2013/02/copying-rubens.html

Copy after Nicolaas Rubens with a Coral Necklace
Genuine black chalk (French), genuine sanguine (Ural),
Champagne white chalk, pen and bistre ink,
Canson Ingres paper cream.

Copy after the Portrait of Isabella Brant
genuine sanguine (Zecchi), compressed charcoal,
white chalk, pen and ink, Hahnemühle Ingres paper

***

An aside about genuine black chalk and its modern substitutes:

Black chalk is a luscious medium with a vivid personality and a temper.  With it it's possible to get both a defined line and a fuzzy light hatch-mark depending on the pressure you apply.  It has a cool greyish tone especially important when used in combination with red chalk because it represents all the cool colours while the red chalk takes on the role of all the warm tones.

The material currently available (mined in France and sold by Kremer Pigments) is very expensive with some inclusions that don't produce any marks.  I've read many times that the deposits of good black chalk have all been exhausted, but I'm sure they still exist in various parts of the world and are not explored only because there is no demand.

Currently there is no good substitute of black chalk on the market.  Derwent charcoal pencils (Hard) have the same cool grey tone, but are very soft and powdery, very unlike the genuine material.  General's charcoal  HB is similar to the chalk in hardness but is too scratchy and black.  Pierre Noire by Conte is close, but too waxy, Wolf's Carbon B is too black and chronically inexpressive.
If anyone has a good suggestion for a substitute or a place where I may buy or dig up some real black chalk, please let me know!


©Lala Ragimov

My other posts on topics related to technical art history:

Inspired by Rubens (Getty Museum page, featuring my work)

Preparing to draw (from 1400s-1700s treatises)
Hatching and shading (from 1400s-1700s treatises)

  Copying a Rubens painting (materials, techniques)
English translations of drawing treatises (Goeree, de Piles, Jombert) 

 1400s-1700s drawing treatises online
 Painting materials of Rubens, with bibliography
 Renaissance woodcut tools
 Image gallery: my copies and reconstructions

Copying a Rubens painting

For information on Rubens technique and a bibliography see my Rubens materials page.

My palette consisted of pigments Rubens often used: lead white, various raw siennas, ochres and umbers, charcoal black, genuine vermilion, Van Dyck brown, chalk (used as extender), lead-tin yellow (type I), madder lake, and some blue verditer (for the white clothing).  Half of the paints were made by me from pigment and cold-pressed linseed oil that I bleached in the sun.

Rubens (original, detail)
 "Infanta's Waiting-maid in Brussels", 1623-25.
  The Hermitage.

Lala Ragimov, copy after Rubens

I started by copying a study associated with this painting, an aux trois crayons drawing.

Rubens (original)
Red, black, white chalks, pen and ink
353x283m

Copy after Rubens,
Lala Ragimov

I compared the hatch-mark directions in the drawing to those in the painting (visible through the transparent shadows and half-shadows of the painting) to help guide my underpainting.

The first step was a gessoed panel (calcium carbonate chalk and rabbit skin glue) which I didn't sand enough, so the vertical streaks show up in the final painting (lesson learned).  The diagonal streaks (imitating those in the original) come from the egg-oil emulsion imprimatura the recipe for which was kindly described to me by Charlotte Caspers, artist trained as conservator who worked with Rubens imprimatura reconstructions.  For good information on streaky imprimatura see "Preparation for Painting, the Artist's Choice and its Consequences.", p79.

Some Rubens sketches show the grisaille approach while others exhibit what looks like a "dead-paint" layer, muted local colours in mid and light values.

Peter Paul Rubens,
 "grisaille" approach to an oil sketch
Ashmolean

Peter Paul Rubens,
"dead painted" oil sketch showing muted local colours
Getty Museum

 The pale transparent portrait I was copying gave an impression of a grisaille beginning, so I finished the underpainting in raw siennas and umbers with accents in lead white.

Step 1
Lala Ragimov after Rubens

Step 1.5...
Lala Ragimov after Rubens

After that I moved to "dead-paint" (doodwerf) stage, adding unsaturated approximations of local colours to be worked up later.  You can observe the dead paint layer on parts of two paintings at the Getty, the Calydonian Boar Hunt and the Return from War.

Step 2 face (my take on the dead-paint layer)

 Finished copy, detail

The last stage is  adding outlines, final impasto highlights, glazed transparent shadows and dark lines, and finishing the clothes and background (which were done last in Rubens paintings)

***

For me copying the masters I admire has always been and continues to be the best way to learn.  I would recommend it to beginners and mature artists alike.
1)  I strongly recommend making 1:1 scale copies, because if you scale the brush-strokes up or down you lose a lot of information about the technique.  When Rubens himself made his numerous copies of Titian and others, he made them to scale.  If you are copying inside a museum that has rules about making your canvas bigger or smaller, scale the canvas but not the image.  It needs to remain 1:1 for you to learn about brush sizes, shapes; stiffness or softness of the brush hair; the actual width of lines; quality and thickness of impasto; the scale the artist thought needed to produce an effect; the spirit of the work, etc.  I  believe that it is more informative to copy a detail to scale than the whole work smaller or larger.
2) Works on panel are best to be copied on panel, works on canvas are best on canvas.  Pay attention to the weave of the canvas and observe the correct colour of the priming.  When in doubt about the priming/imprimatura makeup or colour, reading conservation literature will usually help.

More of my copies can be found here.

©Lala Ragimov
no artwork or text by Lala Ragimov may be reproduced without her permission.

My other posts on topics related to technical art history

 Inspired by Rubens (Getty Museum page, featuring my work)
  Copying a Rubens drawing (materials, techniques)
  Copying a Rubens painting (materials, techniques)

 Roger de Piles on drawing technique (excerpt in my translation)
Jombert's drawing treatise (excerpts in my translation)

 1400s-1700s drawing treatises online
 Painting materials of Rubens; bibliography
 Renaissance woodcut tools
 Image gallery: my copies and reconstructions