Cheating When Oil Painting - what is allowed and what is not - Oil Painting Advice

so in this video I want to talk about what is considered cheating when oil painting and I put that in quotes because there's a lot of things that um artists you know there's just a whole Spectrum right there are people out there or artists out there that will only work from Life um will not use any measuring tools at all uh have to uh you know just do everything by sight um don't do any color checking and they think that doing anything other than working that way is considered cheating um but that is a real small minority of of artists that I know that actually work that way um almost all artists that I know I mean I know a few people that only work from life and they tend to be people who just do plain air paintings but they're not detailed they're sort of landscape sketches they're not big massive paintings um or they tend to be people that like to paint a lot of still lives in Shadow Boxes you know I have students for instance that just do not want to work from photo gra s and that's why I when they take my private class here in Austin I give them the op the option to work from life but I actually recommend that they start by working from a glossy photograph um just because and then you know start with that and then go learn to work from life because it's just such a great tool to do your color checking and everything else now you can color check from life you can even do it with a brush or using one of these color Checkers that we sell at Geneva uh Fine Art um but but basically what I want to talk about in this video is just sort of like give you an honest uh presentation of all these different tools that artists are using you know um in the very early days artists didn't think that there was anything like cheating um they would use whatever tools they could they they had before them they were using measuring devices they were uh drawing lines with rulers or you know vermier is there's a whole documentary uh called Tim's vermier that documents that vermier used a lens he projected the light through and bounced it off of mirrors and he basically matched the Colors by looking down right at the painting comparing it in a mirror to what he was looking at and so nobody's saying that he's not a real artist because he was using all of those AIDS so now there is a limit you know you can uh at some point they're going to be making robots that can paint paintings with oil paint to such a high level that you won't be able to tell whether it was painted by a person or not but here's the thing and this is the crazy part about it I mean that day is coming um there will be you know possibly ways that you could prove that you actually the one that painted it and it wasn't a robot that painted it you know but that already exists today in the world of sculpting you can take a 3D CNC machine which is basically a robot that carves wood and you can carve these very detailed sculptures like this and so um so imagine if you go to an art gallery and you see two handcarved heads or at least they're labeled handcarved but little do you know that the one on the left was carved on a CNC machine the entire thing was sculpted by a by a machine and then he then the artist maybe sanded it a little bit and then put a nice varnish on it um and maybe the one on the right was completely chiseled by hand um with hand tools so um and there's no way you can know unless the artist tells you or that you're able to go you know watch him do it or or whatever it is so but that that world is actually coming to artists but here's the thing and this is uh gets into the whole uh thing about you know should you use AI image sources um which I do in my uh some of my videos um but is it okay to use AI image sources uh to paint from and a lot of people would say no that that's a a big you know they don't like it I do know that uh from the very beginning you know when I first started painting I didn't want to use a projector cuz I thought maybe that was cheating uh so for the first about five years I didn't use a projector but then when I did start to use a projector I didn't want everybody to know that I did because I didn't I thought some people would say that was cheating so I did it all in secret and I didn't tell anybody and there was all kinds of things that I did you know I've got this whole method that I teach where you do color cheing and everything well that was something that I came up with on my own and then when I first started to teach people I was really hesitant to thinking should I reveal all my secrets you know it took me years to develop all these these tricks and ways of painting where you could color check and and do your you know your measuring when you're uh drawing and everything and uh but I just decided you know in the very beginning I thought you know if I went to somebody and I wanted them to teach me and they told me everything about their technique except the one real secret that was the most important part I would think you know that's not that's not really I I wouldn't have a lot of respect for that person so I decided that I just should be very transparent and so when I'm talking to other artists I share everything I'm just like I'm doing now I I tell you that I'm working from an AI image I show you how I do uh my drawing by measuring with a proportional divider um I talk about color cheing mixing your rows you know there's a lot of artists that do all of that stuff but they don't tell you that they do that stuff I'm just somebody that's been very transparent with it and I've always tried to be and that's the one thing that I think um if there's anything that's cheating um it would be lying about what you're doing and I think that um you know saying well that I worked from life and I painted this whole thing out of my imagination when actually used an AI image or whatever it was but that would be the one thing that I do think would would be considered uh you know at least deceptive about do uh you know creating paintings but there is another side of this and that is I call this in front of the curtain or behind the curtain so if I back when I used to do portraits and I worked from photographs almost always I did a few from Life in the early days but after that it was all from photographs and but I never showed my clients the photographs so I always wanted my portraits to stand on their own I didn't want somebody to come into the studio look at my portrait and then hold up the photograph and say wow look he did that perfect and oh you know you missed that part and why did you change that I didn't want the photograph to be part of my work of art so in front of the curtain when I'm showing my paintings to clients I don't show the the sources that I work from but as a teacher on YouTube this is behind the curtain I'm showing you how the magic is done and in that case I really feel like it's uh important that I tell everybody so this is just my opinion if you're going to work from AI images or from uh photographs I think that you should tell people yes I use AI images um I get a lot of great ideas by looking at them but my painting stands on its own and no matter what you paint your painting's never going to be exactly like that AI image you're going to put your own uh brush work in there you're going to change things a little bit without even knowing it and your painting will always stand on its own regardless even if you did work from AI images so if you were going to work from AI images I personally would recommend that you don't show people those AI images now you might like I said be honest and say look I use AI images uh you know for ideas or for you know uh to to see how to paint certain things but I would not show them your AI image so they can say hm how well did you do or whatever it is because it really I do think painting should stand on their own when it comes to AI images and whether you should use those as a SCE material um and in my own you know when when AI images first came out and I was looking at it and I was trying to decide do I would I want to use that for for the reason that I started doing it is just because I would see an image like this that I would generate and I think man I want to paint that and uh and so I just thought well you know and and the more I would generate these things you know if I'm going to do a still life you can you can push it in any direction you want the AI is not is you you're the one that's going to guide it you're the one that's going to like say I want this and I want that and I don't like this part and you can continuously U modify these images until you end up with something like this or something like this or something like this and as you can see all of these are ra radically different in style but that's just because that's what I described or that's what I you know and it's not like you know and what I tell my students that are starting to um generate their images on Mid Journey or wherever else um is I say don't just generate some images and then pick the first one that you love instead generate 50 images and then pick the one that you love um or generate an image and then if you don't like something about it you might change your prompt and describe it a little different you know add morning light at the end instead of you know overcast Skies or whatever you want you can direct the the AI to generate these Imes based on your your prompt or your description and U but you're the one that's going to guide it and you're the one that's going to say I like this and I don't like that and so you when I generate images like this one or like this one these are not things that I could like paint out of my imagination and um I might have I may not even have the idea uh for some of these you know I might have a general idea which is why it generated this image because it's just doing it based on the text prompt that I gave it but BAS basically um you know this was not the first one by any means that I generated I think this was probably the 50th or 100th image that I generated with this prompt and then I slowly modified it and changed things and ended up with this and when I see an image like this I just want to paint it and um you know and it's not like like you can get V variations it's not like if I'm painting for my imagination I might have one idea in my head and it's typically really contrived and then I might go paint that but if I'm going to get AI to generate the image I'll say you know what okay let give me one okay there's one from the from a prompt and then here's another one from the same prompt now I can choose which one do I like better and by doing this over and over again you're using AI to come up with these wonderful beautiful compositions um really interesting subject matter and so that's what compels me to want to use the AI images it's not because my painting is going to be exactly like any one of those AI images it's going to be an oil paint and um but you know subject matter lighting composition are so important that I can use the AI to help me to come up with some really wonderful ideas in subject matter for painting so that's why I use the AI oh I wanted to mention that we have a newsletter that comes out on a regular basis now um so if you want to sign up for the newsletter go to the address that I have on the screen here and you can sign up and it's free um there's all kinds of content in there we will be uh answering questions about oil painting I'll be telling you about videos that I've made here on YouTube but also talking about new products at Geneva we're we have a new purple that we're coming out with so if you want to sign up for our newsletter go to the address on the screen here and sign up and you'll be on our newsletter thank you guys so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one

Channel: Draw Mix Paint

Views: 56,578

Keywords:

Id: vs12BEHuM9M

Length: 11min 53sec (713 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 01 2024