How I Get Better at Portrait Painting!

before the video starts i want to say that the merch is being restocked in a few days august 20th mark the date because it's a small restock it will probably go fast thanks for all the support if you enjoy this video smash a like subscribe let's begin just an enjoyable painting session [Music] howdy welcome back to the studio if you're new here i'm salute we're in my art studio right now where a bunch of different creative disciplines within fine arts go down cinematography photography everything in between and sort of within the fingers of fine arts watercolor acrylic paints spray paint murals oil painting i definitely allocate probably the most time towards oil painting a large compartment is reserved for this oil painting practice that i fell in love with two years ago i went to an atelier to start painting naturalistically with oil paints specifically figurative stuff and absolutely fell in love with this practice and in my eyes oil painting is this like golden epic practice that you can infinitely improve upon it's this complex and eloquent challenging language of value and color and observing and representing nature and so i just love it can't get enough and so i put a lot of time aside to improve um and you know i love to practice on these 11 by 14 inch panels i would never sell these these aren't commissions and you know i would never show them in a gallery setting they're just specifically there to kind of maintain my practice and i haven't painted a while i broke my leg so we're really just getting the rust off the joints so to speak in this video two delicious portraits with some creamy tasty oil paint i uh i can't get enough and i really just confessed my love in that mega rant but i've said it before and i'll say it again so let's begin and we are beginning indeed you can see to the right i have the palette time lapse directly with the painting and all the videos i watch on oil painting i always love to see what's going on with the palette so i wanted to include that and we're just starting off you saw i did that big wash and i then subtracted this big circle like the shape of the head and i i really like to do that just to visualize the mass of the head and where it's being placed on the canvas that's the only real reason i do that and i've been doing that a lot really like too and just we're going in with some generic outline trying to find the features and um i'm using the zorn palette by the way titanium white yellow ochre cadmium red ivory black look it up if you haven't heard about it it's a great limited palette very popular i love to use it and i've been using it for almost all my oil painting portraits in the past several months and so yeah this i started off with you know trying to find these highlights and i did that because this is a kind of different more challenging portrait than i usually do generally i love to paint portraits with a lot of delicious shadows you know in a perfect world every painting i want a bunch of dynamic range and i mean what i mean by that is really dark darks and light lights so a bunch of awesome shadows and a bunch of direct sunlight with awesome highlights this portrait has little to no shadows and it's challenging for a few reasons and i'll go in why but i was drawn to this portrait and i'm it's just a photo on the internet um and i'm using my computer for reference but it has this beautiful intense warm light with these awesome highlights so i was like wow this is an epic epic portrait i want to try painting it but you know having shadows in a portrait really help you map out features and nail proportions and find the form um easier i think it's a kind of you know known thing that you map shadows to find proportions and you relate things to the shadows and the shapes of the shadows when you don't have a lot of shadows in a face and it's all direct light it can easily lose its dimension and fall flat and so that's a challenge but you could see right there i just did like three different noses finally i found a nose i liked but that's really the only shadow there the shadow that's casted by the nose and if you've noticed also besides me ranting i've been kind of fumbling around painting over things going from random place to random place and i'm quite an inefficient painter and i really equate my oil painting process to like if you're in new york city you got to get from point a to point b and the most efficient way to do that is walk two blocks and take one subway and what i do this is an analogy to my painting is i walk 12 blocks and take three different subways i think i eventually arrive to something i find successful and think is successful but it's very inefficient and it takes me a while and i constantly paint over things and bounce around a little too much you know i'm pretty comfortable with value and color and mixing colors and all these things i've been painting for like two years and i take it seriously but that's what i think separates really amazing painters obviously the professionals and people who have been doing it for years and years they can you know within one paint stroke they can really nail the color value proportion you know all in one stroke you know first try and so that's something i can't really do sometimes i do it for different parts of the face but generally i repaint things and fumble around until i kind of find it and uh yeah so something i really love about this portrait is not only the green background which i think was a great choice by me but this hair you know it's kind of this platinum blonde into strawberry blonde with dark roots it really looks nice and it was quite enjoyable to paint and yeah just really you know the skin tone from the beginning you might have thought was like this weird gross yellowish hue but you know the light is super warm and these highlights are these delicious warm highlights and i was really amped about it but throughout this whole time pretty standard also with my portrait painting practices the eyes are really difficult for me and specifically this left eye that's just a little too bug-eyed it's a little too far away from the other eye and so um i definitely fix it i actually fixed it during a live stream with my patrons you know every sunday i do these live streams and you can check out my patreon page to get involved with those and i spent a while it's sped up so you can't tell but it was like 40 minutes just to move this eye slightly to the right and make it just a fraction smaller but i think it really helped and in the end i think i got all the proportions pretty well the lips were bothering me a lot in the beginning as well but i fixed those up three-quarter pucker view of the voluptuous lips uh yeah so super happy with this whole portrait and it was i mean it took me so much longer than i expected because it was my first one back after breaking my leg but just an enjoyable time and i'm happy with how it came out first portrait done i think it came out great a little over four hours and all of the strategies and techniques of oil painting i was talking about throughout that voiceover i'm not really here to teach you but the sponsor of today's video certainly can help you out skillshare has been here for a while it's an online learning community with thousands of different classes ranging from all sorts of disciplines within creative endeavors entrepreneurship and all of those classes like portrait painting or drawing or photography they're all taught by the leading professionals within those disciplines and whether you're just a person at home during quarantine looking for a new creative hobby or you're a career professional just looking for more skills you know skillshare has everything for every type of person and some classes i would recommend that really pertain to sort of this video the videos i make and what goes on in the studio is filmmaking from home a large portion of my business isn't just painting it's using a camera using editing software and really exposing my work and then another great class that really is specifically for fine arts is drawing techniques for pencil portraits a great class on anatomy and structure of the face getting those basic fundamentals on how to attack a portrait and for less than 10 bucks a month with skillshare's premium membership i just think it's an unbelievable resource to really get some professional instruction and so for the first 1000 people who click the link in the description below you get two free months of skillshare i really would suggest taking this opportunity it's helped me and there's so many different videos photography social media management entrepreneurship drawing fine arts thanks again skillshare for sponsoring the video back again with another sausage of a painting doing the same thing uh you see taking away the pain i put down just to generally find the mass of the head where it's being placed on the canvas nothing to do with proportion and now i i mean i outline it almost very similarly to that but it's really just to visualize on the canvas and here is a great example of a portrait with shadow so you could see those lines coming down the corner of the eye those are kind of to represent the different planes of the face but also that's kind of where the shadows are and really generic uh outline right there really basic i i always try to practice to be loose and i mix up this delicious green right here and just fill in the shadows first so you know already just with those shadows in you can see the turn of the face where the light source is coming from it almost gives it immediate um dimension and this is this is actually a famous actor i won't tell you to the end maybe you've already figured out maybe not but i just found this picture online i thought it was awesome and epic and it had all the elements of a portrait that i liked great one directional light good shadows three-quarter view and uh also these it's a it's a black man so it has these different skin complexions which is really exciting to paint and use different colors so you know you can see i use this green for a lot of the shadow which i don't usually use and it's really fun to mix it up and find different colors to use in skin tones this is another huge argument or just topic that beginners always want to know what what colors do i mix for skin tones and you could really find so many different colors in any skin tones you know there's generic mixes you can use but it's really fun to find random colors and put them in right now it's just really basic and actually this is something to interrupt myself that i didn't like and i'm looking back at this time lapse like i used too much of this black um too quickly you know i can use black at the very very end just like the lightest of the lights you know you kind of leave those to the end the darkest of the dark slightest of the lights but i go in with the eyes which are very dark and they should be dark but i think i just used too much black to start off it's something that i used to struggle with white i used to use way too much white in all my colors and it would end up chalky but um yeah i'm happy with this i remembered painting this after i painted the first portrait of that girl um i was feeling confident i was really excited because i was just i was just confident um during this process and i loved the portrait and i loved these greens i was using and i just fixed a big issue with the chin that was like my only huge um kind of cosmetic change to the generic size of the face but i'm really just having a blast trying out new things staying loose but i feel like very on track more efficient and on track than the first portrait but there's still issues obviously i can point out that maybe we'll talk about at the end but um yeah something that i enjoyed and did a little differently in this portrait is i i really didn't put too much detail into the eyes like you'll see i put the white into the eyes and that's basically it and it's very um it's very subtle but i think it works and it gets the point across completely which is another thing i practice trying to use less you know save more with less strokes with less detail because i tend to go detailed detailed detail and then it doesn't look like that at all you know it's like this paradox it's like an oxymoron you try to fight for all the detail every little thing you see you try to put down and then it doesn't work it doesn't even look like the person so i'm trying to stay loose and just get the resemblance and you can see in the chin these beautiful colder um tones you know some colder pinks and oranges with the green and the really darks for the shadows i loved it like i'm really digging um his chin if you don't know who this is by now this is lawrence fishborn who is the actor in the matrix and a bunch of other awesome tv shows and movies but this is an actual scene from the matrix one of the best science fiction fantasy trilogies of all time in film um and he is teaching uh neo to fight i think it's like the download in the matrix anyways i clean my palette all the time that's what you just saw this is like another painting session so i cleaned the palette and we we got just the final little thing so it's pretty much done adding some darker darks in the cheekbone for the shadow uh the ear is pretty a bummer i didn't spend too much time on that but it is what it is but i'm super happy with this portrait i think it came out great i think it looks like him for sure and i just had a great time feeling confident throughout the process just great practice that's what this whole video is about and why i do these portraits my dude and this uh this last shot is kind of a bummer actually i didn't notice that until i was editing it's like very glared and not clear but there they are two completely different types of portraits different skin complexions different lighting you know systems dynamicies whatever you want to call it so yeah hopefully you enjoyed this video check out the patreon if you want to do sunday live sessions with me where i paint chill in the studio that's all i got merch restock august 20th thanks for watching

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Views: 70,555

Rating: 4.9531026 out of 5

Keywords: create, slew, art, vlog, vlogger, spray, paint, how, to, mural, graffiti, street, tutorial

Id: N5MAP9Oa40k

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020