Drastically Improve Your Portrait Paintings By Doing This One Thing

all right so I helped a lot of my students drastically improve their portrait paintings by using periodization this helped them do a lot of different things but I feel like the three things it helped them with the most that they were the most surprised about was one it helped them simplify a face like they could look at a face and simplify it into something they could actually draw and paint the second thing was it made painting facial features a lot easier because it showed them how everyone's facial features are pretty much the same and the last thing I showed them was that they get better a lot faster than they initially thought so you're probably asking yourself like what is periodization periodization it was first kind of put into practice by Olympians in the 70s and what they do is they would take their training and they'd break it down into sections like kind of focusing just on one aspect of what they were doing at a time you you see this a lot in sports that's why professional athletes don't practice just by playing their sport like they'll do drills to focus on certain aspects of their Sport and the same thing goes for painting a portrait there's a lot of different aspects to painting a portrait and what I see happen a lot of times is students will try and get better at painting portraits by solely just painting a bunch of portraits and what happens a lot of the time is that they Plateau or they stop making progress and they get frustrated CU they don't know what they're doing wrong and they start painting less which causes their Improvement to slow even more and pretty soon they're just not even trying to paint portraits at all I know because that's exactly what happened to me in the past see I did not learn through periodization I really wish that I had but I didn't I have been drawing and painting portraits my entire life and I thought you know at a certain point that I could just get better and get to where I wanted by just painting portraits I never had any formal training I had nobody telling me to do certain exercises and I did get to where I wanted with my portraits it just took a whole lot longer than it should have and I don't recommend doing it the way that I did and I actually didn't figure out about periodization in this way of practicing until I started teaching which brings me to the story of my student Mike I started working with Mike oneon-one online in 2020 and he had very little to no experience painting he was in his 50s he was a bioengineer running his own company family you know so full obligations didn't have endless time to practice painting and when I first started working with him this is where he was at with his portrait paintings this is a painting he did of alpacino which he ended up calling alien Pacino and I worked with him for a year and he made a ton of progress and it was interesting for me as a teacher because I got to see what worked and what didn't work and what worked was breaking the complex skill of portrait painting down into subskills and just focusing on one subskill at a time so for example with drawing and values I'd have him do an exercise where the face was broken down into simple value shapes this helped him see see a face in a very simple way that seemed doable and realistic to draw and then paint because it's just a bunch of simple flat value shapes I had him paint this plain head model to better understand planes so we could see more form than what was being presented in a photo for colors I'd Haven them do a lot of like small head studies to get the overall shape and form and the colors that were being used to create that shape and form and for the feat feates we went through the features one by one and broke them down in what their structure is everyone's features follow the same base structure they might vary but the same structure is there a nose is going to have four planes the two side planes and then the middle plane and then the plane underneath same thing goes for the eyes and the mouth so just focusing on those and understanding that form made painting features a lot less intimidating so doing these exercises and breaking everything down like this made him get better faster than what he thought and honestly what I thought was possible because at the end of one year this is how he was painting portraits which is a drastic difference and a big improvement from where he started I mean I personally have never made that much of an improvement in my painting in just one year so I was kind of jealous a little bit because it made sense breaking things down just focusing on one thing at a time like imagine if I was like trying to teach you how to play basketball and I was going to teach you how to shoot dribble pass and defend and everything just by saying all right just go out there and just play the game and learn all that stuff all at the same time while playing a game no that'd be a lot harder I'd take thing one at a time like all right we're going to learn how to dribble today then tomorrow we're going to learn how to shoot then the next day we're going to learn how to pass and you would retain the information a lot better and understand it a lot better so once I saw Mike's Improvement I knew I had to like bring this way of working to the rest of my students and so I created my portrait painting 101 course I broke it up into six days or six sections you can go through the course at whatever Pace you like there's no time limit but on each section you focus on a different aspect of portrait painting it's all the ones that I've mentioned before you know you'll focus on drawing and then values and then planes then colors and then features and at the end you painted final portrait which will probably be the best portrait you've ever painted that's the goal so I created this course and I was like I hope this works I mean all these things worked for Mike but that was over a span of a year I wonder if this is going to work with my students over the span of like a week or six days I was like I better run a test group through this and I ran a test group of students through the course it was about 100 students and I was absolutely Blown Away by their progress like I was not expecting this big a leap in their work in that amount of time I was hoping to see some progress but like a lot of the main progress was going to come through practice and practice but after that one week I was like Wow and that was over 2 years ago and since then I've had hundreds and hundreds hundreds of students go through this course with great results I've had them say that it's the best course they've ever bought online others have said that they're shocked at the amount of progress that they've made I've had students say that their friends and family are like asking them for portraits now or like getting commissions which I always tell my students that I say you're going to get commissions a lot sooner than you think and none of them ever believe me until they start getting better like oh my gosh like my aunt or my so and so like they want me to paint a portrait of this like that happened to my student Mike as soon as you got to a certain point the portraits he kept sending me were like of family members and stuff and he's like yeah like they asked me to paint this person oh this person asked me to paint this for them so I always like to say with this course that if you just get one commission out of it it's going to pay for itself all right now speaking of commissions I'm actually going to be hosting a webinar on commissions for anyone who purchases the portrait course before May 20th 20124 will receive an email to register for a webinar I'm holding in July in this webinar I'm going to talk about my experience getting portrait commissions I'm going to give my best advice on getting clients using social media choosing the right photos communicating with clients shipping just kind of everything that goes along with doing painting commissions I'm really excited for this webinar because I've never really talked about this subject that much on my YouTube channel and I'm really interested to see what questions my students have on this subject and again the only way to get access to that is to enroll in the portrait course before May the 20th but a really cool thing about the course that I purposely did was I made it so you could go through it three times there's three different models in the course that you can choose from you can go through the entire course each time with each model cuz I didn't want to create just like a one and done course like I want something that you're going to return to again and again because that's where you're going to make like gigantic strides is the repetition and coming back to it again and again and again I always say that learning to paint is like hearing the same things over and over and over and over until like they finally get into your mind and when they do it clicks and that's when you make those jumps up also included an extra bonus exercise it's a John Singer Sergeant Master Copy but done with just flat shapes now you start paint it out very simple with big simple shapes and then you put shapes on top of that and then even more shapes on top of that it's a really helpful exercise just to get you to think differently when it comes to painting portraits and I've also included one of my most popular portrait tutorials from my Patron on page now normally this course is 247 bucks but to celebrate it being out for 2 years and to celebrate my birthday which is on May 10th I'm actually knocking $100 off so it's only 147 bucks but the sale ends May the 20th so get it soon and there's a link in the description of this video that will take you to where you can get the course if you're on a phone you might have to hit the little more button to show the description I get a lot of people saying they don't see the description so if you just click more on your phone there it should bring down the description this is the biggest sale that I have on this course and I only do it once a year so you definitely don't want to miss it all right I'm Chris fornito here telling you to go get painting

Channel: Paint Coach

Views: 13,952

Keywords: why your portrait paintings look cartoonish, why your portrait paintings look flat and out to fix them, how to instantly improve your portrait paintings, level up your oil painting, improve your portrait painting skills, portrait painting do's and don'ts, how to make your portrait paintings better, my secret to realistic portrait paintings, the most common portrait painting mistake, what everyone gets wrong about painting portraits

Id: uk-_i5NWsyI

Length: 9min 10sec (550 seconds)

Published: Mon May 13 2024