>>5779359>learning how to paint comes from studies, no?I'll have to get a bit pedantic here. OP is asking how to start a master study. That's not quite the same as doing a "study" of primitives or still lifes, which isolate those topics of drawing and values and painting, and is where one ought to start. When someone asks a question like "how do I do a painting study," that kind of tells me they haven't really gone through those requisite steps. Like I said, it's akin to asking how to build a car. It's not a question one would expect from, say, a serious engineering student. It's the question of a child.
Here's the other problem with diving directly into master studies, especially for those working digitally. You're rarely if ever learning the actual application techniques used in the painting owing to the different medium (and frankly one doesn't need to, but there's an expectation that's what should happen), and you're almost never seeing the decision making process behind the painting. For example, I see a lot of people try to copy Sargent paintings using a clean, "direct" painting method, yet that's not what he did. He made very messy and gestural underpaintings, then painted over them. That's a layer of understanding one will miss out on by doing copies alone.
I enjoy studies, but they're mainly helpful after a certain level. For someone like OP who seems to want to learn painting through master studies, this is like taking the long and meandering route with a lot of dead ends.
