Good Brush Habits and How to Load Your Brush with Paint

[Music] so in this video what I want to talk about is brush preparation how much paint to put in your brush but also to talk about how painting is really done on the pallet that most of your time as an artist is spent with thinking about what color should I put in my brush what value what color I should put in my brush before I go and paint it on the canvas and that's a really big deal and let me start by telling you a little story that I read about John Singer Sargent and I don't know I tried to find where I'd written read this story but but I do remember it and it basically there's a girl I believe who's having her sister painted by John Singer Sargent and she's writing to her aunt who or whoever it is and she's describing how Sargent worked and she's saying it's very curious because it's not what you would expect that he spends most of his time playing with his brushes on his palette he runs up to her sister he runs back he's really spending all this time thinking about what color should I put in my brush before I go and paint this a little bit of her jaw line or whatever it is and if you think about it you can understand why that's so important because it's a lot easier to put the color right in fur at first and to really think about your value and then the way I teach to paint using a color checker or even checking it right on your photograph or whatever it is then if you're working from life you'll be you know either using the color checker or holding your brush out but you're making however you go about deciding what color to put in your brush that is where most of your you know mental effort goes in a way and that's where you're going to spend a lot of time playing with your color on your palette before you go and put the wrong color on your painting because if you put in the wrong value or the wrong color it's going to take you even more time to go back and fix that so painting is not playing on your canvas like this painting is prepping your brush and deciding what you should paint with so the next thing to think about other and just what value or what color you're going to put into your paint is how much paint to put in your brush and that's another big deal so let me just get into a little bit of color here and I'm just going to mix up some random color just so I can demonstrate a few things I'm just taking a little this is my you know these are geneva paints and these are I'm just using the essential palette which has got all the the primaries in it and yellow and brown and you can go to geneva fine art dot-com if you want to find out more about these colors and why I chose these as my essential palette but anyway I've just put a random color just a random neutral color into my brush but the first thing you'll see is that if this is just let's just take it and let's just say you've just got this all smeared out and you don't have any kind of pile or anything to work into it and then if I take my brush and if I let's say have a little bit of something else in the brush and it's not going to take much I can go and I can wipe it out on my paper towel but if I just go and pick up this color and then go paint it I mean it doesn't take but three strokes and I've already changed that color as you can see so you know you can't just assume that you're going to just grab that color and go paint on your canvas and it's going to stay the same you need to work your brush into that color so what I would do is I would take some of that color and work my brush into it like that and this is why it's better to have bigger piles of paint so you have some color to play with and then I'll wipe that out on my towel here and then go and pick up some new color and now if I do that you can see that the color stays the same so that's it that's the first thing and then the next thing is on the quantity of paint and let me just build up my pile a little bit here as far as the quantity goes and how much paint to put into your brush if you just mix up color and you don't really think about it and I just take it and you know and just go and dive right onto my canvas you're gonna see that I have this ridge line here of paint and I'm exaggerating it so you could see it better and if I do it that way you can see if I do a ridge that way you can see the glare line that it creates and that's because it's a horizontal line and if it's a horizontal line and my lights coming from above you're gonna see that glare line you're gonna see that you're gonna it's probably going to bother you and maybe you'll take take it out but let's say if I do a vertical one like this now you can't see it because my light is coming from above and it's not reflecting but now let's say you take this studio this painting out of your studio and in your studio I'm assuming your lights coming from above but it doesn't matter if you take it out of your studio and you put it in a different light you may end up with glare and if you look at it now where I've turned on this side light you can see that there's glare all over that stroke so my point being that is that while you're sitting here painting it's really important that you level your paint so you don't just leave it with all these ridge lines on there but that you work it and you make it smooth like I'm doing now and not just in the glare that you can see but if you have a vertical stroke you need to get down and make sure that you're not creating those little ridges of paint rays paint because you know there's all kinds of paint that people make and you know when van Gogh painted he painted with paint right out of the tube and it was super stiff and he could paint impasto he could paint it real thick and it could protrude from the canvas but if you're putting a lot of medium into your paint and the geneva paint for instance comes with medium already mixed into it it's not designed to be to be painted that way because it has all that flow to it it's not really made to be built up into into raised area I mean it's the same as if you went to the hardware store and you bought you know paint to paint some furniture if you pull it up in an area and leave it there or paint it on too thick it's going to wrinkle up and and the same goes for artists paint that's got a lot of medium into it so for a lot of reasons if you're painting in sort of the traditional you know realism you know where you're going to varnish your painting later it's really a good idea to make sure that your painting surface is level and if that means taking your painting you know off of your easel and and you know angling it toward the light so you can see what's going on you know the the more practical way to do it is just to get your head down low and look up into your canvas from below and make sure there's not any you know little ridges of paint anywhere because that's just not a good idea it's not a good idea from a conservation point of view and it's not a good idea because you're going to get all these little reflections everywhere that pain is thick and it catches the light and you may not see it in your studio but move it into a room where the lights coming from the side or from a different direction and all those little reflection spots are gonna appear so you really want to have your painting nice and smooth you know if you take a look at this one here that I painted you can see by looking in the reflection that there's no little bumps that protrude up you know from the canvas that are going to create a little spots of reflection so now if I go back to this paint let's talk about how much pain I should put in my brush and the simple answer is I should put as little paint in my brush rather instead of saying how much pain is in my brush I should say how thick of a stroke to paint on the canvas and if I paint you know if I don't have enough paint in my brush and I'll just wipe some of this paint out of my brush and now if I go and I try to paint here you know I may not be getting full coverage and this color is actually a lot like my stain so it's real easy to get full coverage but let me make a darker color now if I take this color and I just take a little bit of it and let me just wipe it some of it out but as you can see I'm not getting full coverage so that would be not enough paint but if I put just enough to get full coverage then that's the perfect amount in other words just enough to get full coverage but no more and it's not a critical thing obviously you can put you know there it's not like you have to be exactly that amount but that's kind of what you're trying to aim for and that also helps you as you go as you move forward when you start to paint the less paint you have on the canvas you know in other words if it's real thick and you're painting it on real thick and then you want to come in with some more pain or you want to make adjustments the thicker that paint is the harder it's going to be to a jump to make adjustments or to change the color or whatever it is this just starts to it's just that much quicker turns into a big mess it's hard to deal with so I hope that's helped oh I wanted to say one more thing about the number of brushes that I hold I work with a lot of brushes at one time and that's because it just makes it so much easier I keep a small brush that only has black in it and that's because I don't like my blacks to get milky and I just like to have a pure brush that's only for black and I have a small one and then a medium-sized one and even a big one if I'm doing large paintings and then I'll have at least two if not three or four brushes for my dark not black but one or two steps out of black and then I'll have two or three brushes for my medium colors and then I'll have a couple brushes for my very light colors my highlights and my colors that have a lot of white in them and then every time I'm going to change brushes or change colors I pick up my brushes and I look for the ones that are closest to whatever it is I'm about to mix and so that's about it and just remember you know it really is most of your time should be spent on your palette instead of painting the wrong color onto your canvas which you're going to just have to go and fix later so anyway I hope that's helpful and we'll see you guys next time you

Channel: Draw Mix Paint

Views: 328,987

Keywords: mark carder, carder method, oil painting techniques, realism, fine art, learn to paint, how to paint, brushwork, artist, geneva, geneva fine art, geneva fine art supplies, geneva paint, color mixing, limited palette, alla prima, sargent, paint, painting, paintings, painting demo, mix paint, mix color, mix pigment, mixing color, mixing paint, mixing pigment, color theory, color wheel, color paint, color painting, oil paint, pigment, method, technique, wet in wet, brushes

Id: QcbczGCxkA8

Length: 11min 17sec (677 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 19 2017