The Dance Class

Course Title: Paint Like Vermeer: The Dance Class

Are you interested in creating your impressionist art? This tutorial series is perfect for you! In this series, you will learn old and new painting techniques to reproduce Degas’s “The Dance Class.” Degas’s unique style captured smooth, fluid movement with a soft pastel feel to his paintings. By practicing his direct painting style and use of color, you can incorporate new ideas into your artwork. You’ll need to create a light, almost blended background and a heavy foreground to give your painting a sense of depth. By using a simple, limited palette, you’ll be able to achieve excellent results, and it’s essential to verify your colors with a color checker. The initial sketch is critical to the success of your painting. It will help you correctly place and proportion all the dancers and objects before starting the underpainting.

Skill Level: Intermediate to Advanced

Recommended Prerequisites:

Creating working Images in Photoshop

How To Paint With A Limited Palette Like A Pro

Get Accurate Colors With The Color Checker!.

Build a Color Checker for under $10.00.

The Dance Class Original

Recommended Prerequisites:

Creating working Images in Photoshop

How To Paint With A Limited Palette Like A Pro

Get Accurate Colors With The Color Checker!.

Build a Color Checker for under $10.00.

Material List

Materials List for Oil Painting Reproduction:

The canvas has been coated with gesso, rotated horizontally and vertically, and sanded smoothly between each coat. As a result, I painted this canvas three times to keep a semi-rough working surface to support impression types of techniques.

Clickable links will take you to Amazon, where they were purchased for reproduction.

Tools:

• Proportional Divider
• Color Checker
• Glass Palette
• Palette Knife
• Ruler
• Red or Black Pastel pencil for gridlines

Canvas For Reproduction:

22″ W X 28″ H prepared canvas

Oil Paints:

All reproductions use a minimal pallet of six colors:

• Cadmium Yellow
• French Ultramarine
• Burnt Umber
• Titanium White
• Vermillion Hue
• Ivory Black

Glazing Mixture:

• Pure Refined Linseed Oil for mixing and thinning
• Windsor Newton Glazing and Blending Medium for glazing and thinning for details

Sketching With Paint:

Gamblin Gamsol is a solvent artists use to clean their brushes and thin down brown paint for the initial sketch on canvas. Remember not to use Gamsol or any other cleaning solvent for anything other than sketching. For example, George Werbacher uses brown paint thinned with Gamsol when needed for the initial oil painting sketch. In addition, George uses linseed oil only when prepping oil paints for use in all his reproductions and originals.

Demonstration Videos: