Do THIS for Subtle Portrait Painting

foreign let's talk about how to use a Master Copy to achieve more subtlety and Nuance in your paintings my name is Chelsea Lang and if you are new here I am a professional oil painter I specialize in expressive loose portraiture and I have new videos every week sharing how I create these kinds of paintings and how you can take your painting practice to the next level so if you enjoyed today's video or learn something cool please make sure to like subscribe and hit the Bell icon today I'm going to be studying Sergeant's portrait of Elizabeth Winthrop Chandler and I am choosing to study this portrait in particular because in general portraits of women especially younger women or portraits of children tend to be really tricky because there is so much smoothness to the facial Anatomy as painters it's really easy to inadvertently exaggerate hard lines or to create really sharp returns of the form which tend to either age or masculinize your sitter so these really soft rounded forms that we see here in Sergeant's portrait are especially instructive because they are on the challenging side on top of that I just especially love this portrait for the subtle delicacy of the form the flesh tones the value shifts and I especially love it for the handling of the eyes I recently made a video talking about the most common mistakes that you can make When painting eyes and I actually had this portrait in mind when I was talking about those common pitfalls here in this portrait her eyes are handled so softly and delicately but they are so incredibly convincing that I was really excited to dive in to learning from this particular piece so before I dive in I want to go ahead and give you a rundown of what materials I'm using starting with my Surface so I'm using a Raymar C13 double primed linen panel now I think the surface of all things is probably the least significant I could have done this on Centurion oil primed linen paper I could have done this on aluminum composite material that I primed myself with an oil or lead alkyd ground there's really just so many possibilities here but what I'm looking for in my Surface regardless of what I happen to be using is that I don't want the weave of the linen or the texture of the surface I'm working on to be so textural is to be distracting so this is a medium weave panel I would say A medium or fine weave for this kind of study would be ideal the kind of texture I'm not looking for is a super coarse weave or the cotton canvas that comes really cheaply at most art supply stores I find that that surface in particular just soaks up a lot of oil it's it's very absorbent the paint that goes on tends to look very dry as a result and you really get a lot of that bumpy cotton texture coming through next up let's go ahead and talk about my palette I'm using my standard oil painting portrait palette for this piece so this is what I'm going to be using in nine videos out of ten kicking off we have Williamsburg titanium white from there Windsor and Newton yellow ocher pale I also have Windsor Newton cadmium yellow pale I do not use this very much in this portrait it's really just to help me get her lip color specifically so I do not have much of that CAD yellow out moving on we have Windsor and Newton permanent Rose then Rembrandt transparent oxide red and Rembrandt transparent oxide Brown followed by Windsor Newton Terra Rosa and then Rembrandt Viridian and Rembrandt ultramarine blue deep this palette is really great for most portrait work the only thing that it's not super great at capturing is really Vivid High chroma colors so if I happen to be painting a portrait of a sitter in front of a bunch of flowers I would probably add a good deal of cadmiums to this particular palette if I were painting a figure outdoors I might want to have a couple of additional greens or blues at my disposal just to like really capture the colors of the greenery or the sky but in general this palette has really what you need to capture most skin tones and most like subtler colors that you might see in the sitter's clothing or in the background now my medium for this piece is rublev's Olea gel that is very similar to gambling's solvent free gel medium so you can use those two things interchangeably but I personally happen and to have a tube of oehl right now that's going to be the medium that I use to create the consistency I want for the majority of the painting but in the very beginning of this piece I do use some gamsol just for the very first layer of paint that touches the canvas I find that using gamsol in the very first layer helps me to get the kind of slick surface and really easy blending that I look for but once I have that first layer down I do put the gamsol away and I use Olea gel pretty exclusively now I get a lot of questions about my use of medium and what exact ratio you're looking for here and it's not so much that there's a mathematical ratio that you can rely on this is true whether you're talking about the gamsol wash or you are talking about your use of medium like Olea gel when I am thinning something with gamsol specifically I'm typically looking for it to be wet enough that the paint goes on really smoothly and will blend really nicely with itself but not so wet that it it starts to run down the canvas when I switch over to the medium and I'm using Olea gel I really try and think about getting a texture out of the paint that's like closer to mayonnaise that's I think the easiest descriptor I have and what I'm looking for when I applied on the canvas is that I want the paint to go on looking wet and I want it to come off of my brush easily without being super runny or without adding so much medium that the paint starts to look translucent but typically doesn't require a lot of medium to get that effect so if you notice things like running down the page that's probably too much gamsol or too much medium if it's transparent and you aren't in that stage of your like initial wash again that's probably too much medium but if the paint is starting to look really dry or it feels really stiff you can probably use a little bit more and finally for brushes I have really been favoring Rose Mary's Ivory long filberts and the creative Mark quality filberts that's what I use for the vast majority of this painting and I use them fairly interchangeably granted the the ivories are a synthetic bristle and they can really work with stiff paint very effectively that being said a lot of my ivories have started to splay a little bit so I don't always have great control over the marks I make with that brush so if I want something that's a little bit more smooth a little bit more contained that's where the qualities really come in handy so as you watch me painting this piece if you see a brush with a black handle that's probably one of my rosemaries and if you see a brush with an orange handle that would be a creative Mark qualita now with all of that out of the way let's talk about the actual painting of this piece so if you backtrack to the beginning of me working on this painting the very first thing I do is I block in with very simple lines and this is transparent oxide Brown just end with some gamsol but the color isn't really important but you'll see me put an indicator in for the top of the head the right side of the face I'll go ahead and make an indicator for the left ear and I'll kind of connect that to the left side of the face and then go down to the chin and make sure all of this is connected I like to start my blockings this way because it is so much easier to check if I'm putting these landmarks down in the right spot when it's really simple and if I'm wrong I won't have wasted a lot of time trying to put in a lot of detail so I'm not trying to get a super specific super accurate drawing this stage isn't about making it beautiful it's simply about giving myself the minimum amount of information that I can then check to make sure that all of this is in the right place and as soon as I have those key indicators in there so I know where the boundaries of the head and the face are I've put in a general indication for the location of the eyes the eyebrows the bottom of the nose the mouth then I will go ahead and use typically Photoshop to just make sure I'm on the right track with my drawing a long time ago I made a video on exactly how I do this so I will link this in the upper right hand corner if you are curious how I use Photoshop to check my drawing that being said any kind of tool that you can use to assess the accuracy of your drawing is what you want to go to here so backing up squinting taking a look at your painting compared to your reference and thumbnail setting up your painting in your study in a site size format so you can really easily check your drawing all of those things are equally valid I just personally am comfortable enough with Photoshop that it's really easy to check my drawing this way and then get back to it but it is really important that you check that drawing as early as possible before you've committed too much to the canvas that it's going to be kind of painstaking to fix any errors that you might have now from here the very next thing that I do is I go ahead and mask in my general like swaths of color and again I do this with paint That's thinned with just enough gamsol that it covers really easily and smoothly and blends really nicely with marks that are already down but not so much gam salt that it starts to run down the canvas so I have an overall flesh tone in here I have some overall Shadow shapes I have overall color and value of the hair again a general indication for the color of the neck and then the background comes last you'll notice that this is super general I'm not going into detail here I'm not making really small shapes of color and I'm not building up the paint particularly thickly at this point in fact it's very thin because I just want to get an overall impression that I can then step away from you know get eight to ten feet back squint at it and ask myself do these colors and values and shapes look like the general impression of this Sergeant painting and once the answer to that is yes I can start to go in and break these shapes down a little bit add some more nuance and detail to them and start to commit to the specific little pieces of color and little shifts in value and nuances of the drawing that I don't already have in and as I look back through this footage it's worth noting that this painting was easiest to make in that initial sitting so I took a break on this piece just because I found myself running out of steam and losing focus and when that's the case if I'm like almost done on a piece it can be worth it to kind of power through and find that last little bit of energy but if there's a lot more to do and you're tired I find that it's honestly better to intentionally step back and then come back to the painting when you're fresh and that's what I did here so I've worked on this piece over the past several weeks often going several days to a week between sittings and once I take a break any time that I would take a break like that the paint will dry and you'll notice that all of my efforts after that very first stage they start really looking blocky um because the paint that I put down when I begin my next session isn't blending with any of the paint from the previous session I often have people ask me whether I intentionally let the paint dry between sittings or whether other painters work this way and some definitely do some painters really like to have the paint set up and dry between sittings so that they can achieve a fax that you can't get when the paint is wet but to get a really wet Alla Primo look which is what I'm drawn to it's going to be easier to work without the paint drying on you now this does create a bit of difficulty because you have to get comfortable working with really wet paint which can feel a bit like ice skating all over your canvas but it is worth putting the practice in because it gives you so many options for a painting if you don't have to let your paint dry between sittings and I I wish that I had had the energy to do this all in one setting the reality is that I just didn't but it's worth noting that it would have made this a great deal easier for me one thing you might see me do in this footage if you do it's it's very quick but I will often oil out my piece if I have taken a significant break between sessions what this does is it brings some Luminosity back into my darks so the darks tend to sink in and look like there's like permanent glare on them once dark paint starts to set up and dry it makes it really difficult to judge your colors and your values once that starts to happen so oiling out can be really useful to make sure that you are actually mixing accurate paint and putting on the canvas where you mean to the other reason that oiling out is beneficial is that it creates a Slicker surface for the paint to move on to and I find that my brush marks look more wet when I've oiled out the surface first if I'm working across multiple settings if I don't do this you will start to get that kind of scumbly dry brush effect that you see when the paint looks really dry so if this is something you want to do there's a couple of things that you should know first I am simply oiling out with a bit of Olia gel or I could do the same thing with gambling's solvent-free gel medium all you do is make sure your surface is fully dry to the touch you will apply as little Olio gel using a clean brush as possible um and then you still might wipe away any excess just to make sure that layer of only a gel that's on your canvas is as thin as it possibly can be and then from there you can just Dive Right straight into painting the other thing that's worth noting about oiling out a piece is that it does impact how archival this is you are introducing a layer of typically just straight oil into the middle of your paint film if you continue painting after you oil out a piece so it's not perfect or ideal solution um but if you're careful and you don't go overboard with it it is a really useful tool to keep in your tool kit so once I had the basic block-in established and then I started to go in and like Whittle down my shapes and add more Nuance honestly the main thing that I thought about to take this piece from that stage to what you see at the end of this video I hesitate to call it the end because I might still do a little painting on it is I am really just looking at my painting next to the reference on my monitor next to my easel and I'm asking myself what's the biggest difference I see between these am I capturing these little shifts in value or in color temperature am I creating the right softness to the edge around something like the eye have I captured her expression accurately or do I need to make a slight shift to the tilt of her eyebrow or the expression of her eye itself and there's really no secret to this at this stage there are certainly little tips that came up as I worked through this things like making sure that when I painted the iris that I didn't go too hard with that edge when I painted the white of the eye next to it that I thought of it as a very blue gray that I was careful not to take the white of the eye to light or make the Highlight in the eye to White I also waited as long as I could before I put that highlight into the eye itself and whether I call this painting done today or I pick it back up in another week and continue noodling on it it'll be done when I can no longer see differences between this and the reference that I understand how to solve and at the end of the day that is what I do every time I sit down to paint whether I'm working on an original piece or a Master Copy if you have questions about doing a Master Copy for yourself or learning these kinds of nuances from a master painter like Sergeant please let me know in the comments because I would love to address them in a future video and if this is the kind of work that you would love doing and getting professional help with this is exactly the kind of help that I give my students inside of my mentorship program if you'd like to find out more about how that program works I have a link down in the description to find out more and apply to see if we are fit to work together all right until next time happy painting [Music]

Channel: Chelsea Lang

Views: 88,121

Keywords: oil painting, time lapse, art, painting tutorial, art tutorial, art time lapse, alla prima, chelsea lang, painting, oil painting techniques, chelsea lang painter, alla prima oil painting, chelsea lang artist, canvas painting, paintings, painting ideas, painting for beginners, how to paint, paint with me, oil painting portrait, painting videos, oil painting tutorial, art painting, portrait painting, how to oil paint, painting time lapse, oil painting time lapse

Id: N7zizuJyv_E

Length: 19min 3sec (1143 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 25 2023