Alla Prima Brushwork Demo & more – Ep.9 Oil Painting Q&A with Mark Carder

welcome to oil painting question and answers episode number nine before we get into the questions I'm going to do a little painting demonstration that I'm going to paint with the five colors in the Geneva essential palette to address some of the misconceptions about working wet and wet or Alla Prima and one of those misconceptions is that the brushwork is lost if you're working wet and wet or the paint gets all blended together and and people want to see the brushwork so without further ado let's get into the demonstration so I'm going to paint this little pair that I'm going to use to demonstrate some things about brushwork and working wet and wet and but before I do that let me explain to you to sort of views about brushwork on the one hand there are artists who intentionally they will paint whatever it is they're painting and they're intentionally proactively putting brushwork into whatever it is they're painting and artists like that a lot of them will use even square brushes so that when they go in and paint the edge of an apple you can see a square as the brush starts and it's kind of slightly more blocky and there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing it that way it's a complete it's a style of painting and but let me just tell you my own perspective and I think at least I've always felt like this is where the way Sargent thought about brushwork and also some other great artists but what I do is I don't I try not to think about brushwork at all and and what I'll do instead is think about execution and what I'm trying to do you're thinking I need to put that shadow right there so you put the shadow there and you see a glow and so you put the glow there and you're you're painting with a strong stroke because you're just you know knocking it out wet and wet you're painting a still life in and you know 20 minutes or whatever it is and as part of that and I think that that's how sergeant painted that's how he could sit out and in a you know field and dash something off in a hurry or even even a portrait he was very much about putting getting the right color in his brush and then putting it where it goes but I don't think he was actively sort of trying to create this brushwork in other words what you're looking at is your is your is your source you know you're trying to paint what you see and in the process of trying to paint what you see there's brushwork because you haven't gone in and you know polished it up to look like a photograph and so that's kind of my perspective so I'm going to paint this pair and when I paint this pair I'm going to try to be confident with my brushstroke I'm going to think about my colors I in fact I've already as you can see I've already mixed up this palette of color here this is not the methods that I teach and I want to make this point very strong because I don't I think that if you're learning my method or your you're learning to paint and oil for the first time this is not how you would mix a palette of color you would not want to mix these smears you would want to go and follow the online course it's free draw mix paint calm you can find it right there and do that do it that way this is really how I paint and so I don't do that much pre mixing you know I mixed every one of these colors in about 10 or 15 minutes I'm going to mix a lot more colors as I go I'm going to play with color I didn't even get into some of the Browns up in the stem but that's how I I would normally paint a still-life but I don't recommend that you paint that way if you're starting out so let me get into this and and see see how it goes so I might check a few colors and if I want to see what this shadows doing I can just do a quick check like that but I don't normally check colors very much when I'm painting when I'm doing demonstrations for students you know I might check my colors more to sort of explain how but when I'm painting myself I really don't do very much color checking I just sort of trust my instinct on it and it's an instinct that anybody can develop over time but before I even get started I'm going to put in some some lines here that's actually going to be a little bit more and just kind of give myself something to look at and maybe just a couple of marks for the top just so I can in fact you know what I may do is I could just take some background color which I haven't mixed exactly just kind of draw this pair in and I'm not trying to paint this pair exactly as I see it I'm just using it really I mean in other words I don't really care if my pair like that pair I really just am dashing it down as I would if I were painting a still life on my own and again I don't recommend that if you're starting out that you do your drawing as quickly as this it's much better if you're checking yourself using a proportional divider and learning how to draw before you get into this level of just going for it so to speak and I always try to work my values and paint from dark to light so that's why I'm going to go up here and put a little bit of this dark stem color just so I can have it to look at because if you build your values right you have more to look at and you're able to sort of see it sooner instead of just looking at a bunch of brushed paint all over the place and if you're not an experienced artist and you haven't or if you haven't done any color checking or use my method before a lot of these colors I'm laying in may look wrong to you at this stage and you might think they're too dark or whatever it is but that's once you do enough color checking and I mean just two or three paintings you will find that you can see through all those optical illusions and these colors that I'm putting in right now are actually just right in their value and so it may look like they're too dark but they're actually just about right so you'll notice as I paint this pair that I'm really not thinking about brushwork at all I'm really just going about my business and putting the values where I see them without any thought about trying to create anything special in my brushwork I'm just you know laying in my values very boldly thinking very much about the values I'm thinking about in an extreme way I'm thinking about is this too light or is this too dark that's my number one concern and then as far as the color goes I just shift it and alter it and play with it on my palette and then just go and lay it in and don't think too much about brushwork or trying to be you know leave more brushwork or less I'm just executing I'm just filling in these empty spaces with the values that I think belong there and again a lot of this that I'm doing here is just from years of experience of understanding being able to see color and value without doing as much checking as you as you would do if you're starting out and learning to paint or especially if you're just or I should say even if you're just learning my method for the first time I recommend that you do a lot more checking than what I'm doing here but the far as the brushwork goes you know I have a certain brushwork that I just don't ask me where it comes from but sort of the way that I paint I try to maintain a lot of abstraction and what I do and that's the only sort of thought and that's only because I've learned that that's the way the natural world is but again the reason I maintain an abstraction and what I'm thinking about while I'm painting is not brushwork but maintain and have the abstraction and that's because it's important you see that in nature you see that in you see that in this natural pair that I'm trying to paint but if you look at it um you can see and this goes back to ugly painting or painting ugly if you look at the pair at this point and compare it and look at the colors that I'm mixing it's really you know if you're getting close and look at it there's there's not and this is really even more true if you're the one who painted it but it looks ugly and it's only at a rims length does this begin to work at all and the other thing that's always important is to get some background in and so by painting this table in and getting the colors you know late in around the base of the pair that's going to help me to see the colors right in the pair one of the things about wet-on-wet is that you can put brushstrokes on top of wet paint it's not like you can't paint on top of paint some people think that if you're painting wet on wet you can't paint in layers but in a sense if I want to put a line in here and just draw it right into it and if I want to make it even a harder line you can do anything just paint right on top of course you're going to get some mixture the longer you paint into other paint but one of the nice things about wet-on-wet is you can do things like you know blend it into each other and create new colors so let me go back to maintaining the abstraction and you know even if you're painting a plastic chair which is not natural you still will find abstraction in the way the light reflects it's just everywhere and what maintaining the abstraction means is that I'm not painting dot dot dot or a line or you know our eyes are always oversimplifying everything we see so this reflection down here in the bottom of the pear or the way this the table edge hits if you'll notice I'm always leaving it messy in them and it's something that I've developed a habit for but as I fill in a background or you know every stroke of the brush there's a little bit of noise in what I do I stop short I twist I turn I scrub I make a little bit of a mess in everything and I don't clean it up another nice thing about wet-on-wet and this is a huge thing as you can change the color I started to put some blue in here and if I don't like it I can just mix in another color and blend it right into it and create a new color as opposed to when you're working wet on dry you really can't bring up any of your under painting and it's real easy to adjust the color if you need to if I want to put some little bit more red in my background I just blend it into what I've got and I can change it easily and it all stays unified it works together so as you can see there's plenty of brushwork in this wet and wet paint and it's really just a matter of how much further I want to take it and with wet and wet it's not as if once you paint something you can't paint further you can change things if I decide this shadow across the center here is a little bit too light which I think it is I can just go in there and change it so this pair is basically I mean I could leave it like this if I was wanted to leave it this rough and and I probably I'm not I certainly don't want to make it all polished or anything but what I may want to do and this is another thing that's a misconception about wet and wet is that I might want to make changes if I decide for instance you know I didn't really worry at all about the shape of this I'm not trying to paint this perfect pair I'm just knocking out a pair and not thinking about what I may want to do is change the shape because for whatever reason and so let me just show you how simple it is to push lines around I'm going to go ahead and finish this little bit of background here but let's say that I want to push up the top of that pair up here you can just move your line just as simple as that I've got that stem cutting across but you know what I'm just going to repaint the stem so wet and wet you can certainly make changes and in a lot of ways it's easier to make changes because you have all that color to blend into and you get real nice transitions but let me just make a few obvious changes that I see where I missed a few things so if I want to take that spot out I can just paint over it now do I want to fix the shape of this pair I could bulge this bottom out a little bit put some of that nice reflection color so I'm going to push this line a little bit that way bring this shadow over a little bit so I can do all of this while I maintain a strong brushstroke maybe put a little bit of noise in there there's a few spots that I see it's always good to have a little bit of noise and not too over you know to mimic some of this texture that I see you know one of the things about a lot of great Alla Prima artists like John Singer Sargent who painted I think primarily wet and wet when he was painting and this goes for a lot of the great Alla Prima realist and is that when they painted paintings they would often pull him off the walls and make changes or decided that the composition should be different or they didn't like a shadow or they wanted to change a color and so the painting would be dry maybe not finished but just dry and and you know forgotten about for you know a few weeks and then pulled off the wall and an adjustments are made or changes are made so you invariably end up painting wet on dry and that happened to me quite often when I was painting portraits where I would have to make a change or I decided I didn't like something and it had already dried and I would just go in and paint on top of it and so I did quite a bit of wet on dry painting but in general it's as far as the main execution it's all about wet in wet so that's it for today's lesson and now let's get into some questions I would like to approach a gallery owner about a show and wonder how much inventory I should have before talking with them I usually suggest that you know ten paintings there's no magic number but I think that you certainly want to have more than three or four art galleries always like to know that artists have a body of work that represents you know their style and so they can you know more properly gauge what sort of artists you are and also if they're going to have a show you know it's going to be more than three or four paintings but one thing I would very much do is is don't hesitate if you paint paintings that you feel like are not your best you know sell them to your relatives at a discount or give them away or whatever or just put them in the Attic but I would only show the galleries your very best work and I think ten is probably a good minimum number to have to show I live in a very rural area without an art community what are your thoughts on finding a mentor is there a proper way to contact artists online to seek advice or critiques I don't think there's any particular way you know other than sending an email or whatever it is but we have an artist forum where artists can ask questions discuss each other's work even you know there's a lot of things that I don't know in particular like I don't do any glazing and there's things that I don't teach but you'll find artists on there that have you know done all these methods and any question that you post on our forum will usually get you'll get an answer within you know 12 or 24 hours and it's almost always correct and a very good answer so it's a great place to interact with other artists online mark have you ever painted any self-portraits if so would you care to show one or two would you suggest using a mirror or a photo when attempting a self-portrait I've never painted a self-portrait otherwise I would show you one regarding whether to work from a photograph or a mirror I think working from a photograph is is certainly easier in the sense that you have a perfect model that's going to freeze and you can focus on your work instead of trying to you know every time you turn to the mirror you have to essentially repose yourself so it's a little more difficult a little more trouble in that way but other than that I you know I always like to work from life because getting a good photograph is difficult and you can always count on your colors being natural if you're working from life so you know there's advantages to either one I would probably work from life if I was going to do my own just to make it more interesting I tend to paint with a broader stroke when I work from life when I work from a photograph I tend to be a little more detailed but it's not a huge deal if you do work from a photograph you know you might want to consider flipping the image in Photoshop so that it's a mirror image of you because that's what you're accustomed to looking at and then it'll be more like a traditional photograph or a rather self portrait where you're you know seeing a mirror image of yourself but other than that I really don't have any advice about that do you have a video on how to paint from start to finish that covers the basics of painting I do I have several videos if you go to draw mix paint calm and look at the list of videos there there are three in particular and we have them highlighted they are the first one is how to draw in proportion the second is how to mix colors and the third one is how to paint in oil and those three videos that's the real meat of my method and I would definitely watch those first to get a sense of you know what it's all about I also have a video for sale that is how to paint realism which is really just a very in-depth version of the how to paint and oil it goes into the basics but also gets into more in-depth fabrics and painting glass surfaces reflective surfaces so I also have that video available well that's it for today's episode thank you for watching again if you have any questions for me leave them in the comments section of this video and I will get to as many of those questions as I can next week we've had some questions regarding the color checker which I was not able to get into in this episode but we're going to be addressing those questions in an upcoming episode how to use a color checker when you're painting plein air how to use a color checker when working from a computer monitor some of those things which I think will be very helpful so be sure to tune in in upcoming episodes and we'll address those questions thanks for watching

Channel: Draw Mix Paint

Views: 479,646

Keywords: mark carder, carder method, oil painting techniques, oil painting lesson, oil painting tutorial, oil painting class, painting techniques, painting lesson, painting tutorial, painting class, realism, fine art, learn to paint, how to paint, still life painting, brushwork, artist, geneva, geneva fine art, geneva fine art supplies, geneva paint, color mixing, limited palette, drawing, alla prima, sargent, paint, painting, paintings, painting demo

Id: 0Gml1xl72qE

Length: 24min 21sec (1461 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 16 2015