* Hi, so it is currently day
18 for me in quarantine, and you know,
I think it's time to do something a little crazy, add some pizzazz in my life. Today
I am going to challenge myself to recreate the most famous painting of all time, The Mona Lisa,
painted by arguably the best artist of all time.
I know its hard to believe that it's not me!
But my boy, Leonardo da Vinci.
Before we get into it, if you are bored during quarantine,
you guys want to see some good trash, head on over to my TikTok. There,
I have art tutorials as well as art tips.
And if you wanna see other artwork of mine, head on over to thine Instagram.
And if you want to get really crazy during quarantine, you can even check out my Twitter. I would be honest here,
nobody follows my Twitter so it'd be cool if you could. And yeah, without further ado, let's get this party started.
Now, when it comes to crayons, believe it or not, I don't just have Crayola, I actually have a few other brands and varieties.
So let's go over those right now. Of course, I'm gonna be using the staple, the one, the only
48 pack of Crayola crayons.
These are just like, the most classic crayons
you could absolutely have, which, there are supposed to be 48 in here, but for a TikTok hack I used four of them.
Do not add glue. I repeat, do not add glue!
And the worst part was that TikTok hack didn't even work out,
so I wasted those good crayons for nothing.
Now as far as like, the pigmentation goes of the Crayolas, I would say that's not bad at all.
That's definitely something I can work with.
Although I don't want to get ahead of myself because I have never in my life blended two Crayolas together
so I'm curious to see how blending will work with these.
*Music*
Huh, okay, that's actually not bad at all. I would say this is pretty good. The pigment, the blend ability, it passes the flag check.
The next set of crayons that I'm gonna be using today, and these crayons I've never used before, they're honestly just a novelty crayon that
I got for Christmas that Zach gave me, and these guys are literally the coolest crayons in existence. These are
Andy Warhol Campbell's Soup
crayons.
Andy Warhol is one of my favorite artists,
he is a pop artist who did a whole entire
series featuring the Campbell's soup cans and every single crayon is named after like, one of his paintings, like, the theme of it.
And these crayons, I don't know if they're gonna be any good since they're novelty crayons,
but I really wanted to use them at least one time in my life.
God, this little thing is loud!
*Shakes aggressively*
These kind of remind me of those crayons you get at Red Robin.
But I don't think I should be too hard on these because these are just a novelty crayon.
Like, the Crayola will do the blend test.
Oh wow. Do you see the difference in pigments? Do you see how like, dark and deep
this one is, versus how light this one is? Yeah, these crayons are definitely not made for art.
They're just made for looking cute. Just like Bowie!
*Rubber duck squeak*
*Music*
Oh gosh. Uh, on second thought, I don't know if I'm gonna use these crayons because...
yikes. *oof*
Now these next crayons, I really debated like,
should I put them in? Should I not?
But ultimately I decided to go with these because they are crayons and they are really good, and these are
Caran d'Ache neo-color, color one, wax resistant, water-resistant, wax crayons.
Now these are basically the top of the line crayons,
I did a whole video on these and let me tell you, the price was not cheap!
*Cha-ching*
Boom! Look at that. Ah, it's so beautiful. The texture is literally just crayons but man, the pigment on these is so beautiful,
it's so smooth, it doesn't go everywhere.
That, my friends, is the stuff. Ooh! She is looking so good!
Especially when you compare it to that. *Laughs*
*Fart sound*
All right, so now that I've tested out everything, I have a good feel for everything,
it's time to actually start the drawing.
Now, since I'm using crayons for the first time to EVER make a serious drawing, I have to be very careful with paper. Like, I
don't want it to have too much thickness to it because then it's gonna overlap and get super waxy
and I won't be able to blend and you don't want a super smooth paper like printer paper, because then it's not gonna catch that
much wax and you're gonna have the exact OPPOSITE problem of the last one.
So it's like a weird Goldilocks kind of thing, like not too hot, not too cold,
just like, the perfect amount of paper and in this case,
it's a mixed media paper, which naturally it's a, already a combination of like, watercolor paper and regular paper.
I'm fully convinced it is designed for this!
Alright, so the first step of the actual drawing will be to sketch out the proportions and I'm literally just gonna go in there and
sketch it out by hand because the Mona Lisa already is a very proportionate photo - not photograph,
painting, so it'll be very easy to transfer the proportions onto a piece of paper.
And you'll notice, instead of just doing the outline, I'm going in with the shadows and the highlights.
The reason I'm doing that is to help me better understand the proportions because there's so much shadows in the Mona Lisa,
it's...it can be a little tricky to find exactly where the outline is.
And I really want this, the proportions, to be perfect because that's like 90% of the drawing is like, getting the proportions correctly.
So when I was sketching this out,
I beat up the paper just a little bit, just like, constantly erasing and redrawing so I'm gonna
transfer this photograph onto a new piece of paper. That way we can have a nice fresh start.
Now, if you don't know how to transfer your artwork onto a new piece of paper, imma show you right now!
First, get a conté or chalk stick. It could literally be any chalk. Then,
I'm gonna rub it all over the back of my drawing as so. Da da da, here we go, here we go.
Flip that bad boy over and then you're gonna very precisely and kind of hard,
press and go over the outline of your drawing and specifically with the mechanical pencil because it's very precise, very good, 10 out of 10,
would recommend.
Okay, moment of truth. Hopefully it worked. Sometimes it doesn't work.
So, one, two, three.
Hey, it worked! Okay, good.
And so now, I think I'm ready to go ahead and start working with the crayons.
All right,
so the first thing that I'm gonna do is go in with my Crayolas and I'm gonna start working on the most forgiving thing
I can think of, the hair.
And let me tell you, as someone who's very heavy-handed, it wasn't even six minutes in when this happened.
*Pac-Man dying sound*
Now, the good thing with crayons is that there's no drying time. The second that you put down that crayon,
it's on that piece of paper forever, you know, and I really appreciate that. So I finished the hair fairly quickly,
I'm gonna go over it later with the nicer crayons, but I figured, you know,
it's the perfect time to start working on the face, which is
probably the most hardest part of the whole entire drawing.
So we went from really easy to the hardest part. One time, one time in my life,
I was lucky enough to see a real life, in the flesh,
Leonardo da Vinci painting and let me tell you, it looked so realistic,
it didn't even look like a painting. It looked like, next-level.
Like, the blending was insane. And to try to get something like that on crayons, it's gonna be tough.
*Music*
All right, so I'm at a pretty good stopping point when it comes to the face,
but I'm burnt out from working on it because there's so much blending to it
so I'm gonna work on the next thing, which will be her dress.
And then from there go back to the background and then finish up the face.
Isn't that right, Bowie?
Now I have just mentioned when it comes to this, there is a lot of blending and
during the whole entire process of me creating the face,
I think I got the blending down too. I don't want to sound cocky, but pretty good science, you know?
And it took a lot of trial and error so I'm gonna show you guys how I blend
specifically with this. First, I go in with the undertone and the lightest crayon. So for example, the dress is green.
I'm gonna go in with a light green, then I go in with a darker Crayola,
which is the shadow, just to add a little bit more depth and
then I go in and blend everything out with the nice crayons, the Caran d'Ache crayons, and
that seemed to work really really well. I rate the quality of mixing these two brands together, a 10 out of 10.
All right, so now I'm almost done.
I still got the face and of course, the background which we gotta start now. And when I was sketching it,
I noticed so many things that I have never seen before and I'm somebody who's literally seen the Mona Lisa, not in person, but
pictures of it, thousands and thousands of times, you know.
And I never in my life noticed this little bridge. Like, where did that come from?
*Music*
Well, that was fun, but now it's time to get serious, get back to the face!
So I'm gonna go in and start sharpening all the crayons because I need to get very precise.
And it can be kind of scary to like, go in there with a straight black but
I need to add more shadows, more highlights, I need to get in there and make it look like a
Renaissance painting and once the portions are fixed up, lastly,
just gotta blend. Gotta blend, blend, blend, blend!
And finally, ladies and gentlemen, this brings me to the final product!
*Music*
Well, there you go, I'm actually really happy with how it came out. If you guys want to see more art challenges,
I will leave a playlist down below and yeah, stay safe guys, and I will see you next video. Bye!