How I Painted a Portrait and a Fairytale Composition. Painting Childhood. Portrait Commission.

[Music] i was recently commissioned by anthony de stefano an american author to do a portrait of his goddaughter for the composition i wanted to get more information he mentioned that she has two dogs that she likes to capture that special age when you're innocent and the world is beautiful everything surrounds you and dances with you almost that's a beautiful spirit to rescue in a painting i started sketching a line work how similar an outline for literature for writing is similar to an outline in painting because it's just grouping and massing ordering things where things should go so with the simplest of the elements a line which has no value no color is something that moves around and delineates things and crops things with only that element i wanted to tell the whole story that is going to be part of the painting each area will have a form so now it's flat empty just a black and white kind of image adding volume to these areas they start communicating and echoing other parts for the underpainting i create this verdascumberdashu means greenish color this greenish color is gonna have yellow ivory black titanium white but this is a very slow drying white so i'm gonna mix it with a little bit of the fast drying titanium white that way it will dry fast when i need to over paint it another day i'm sure it's going to be dry by then [Music] i'm separating this into some lights and i want it to be gray i don't want it to be that yellow so if i put even in this light area i put yellow and also black so it's gray i'm going to have some darks if i need anything really dark it's going to have pure hybrid black gives me a nice green and then i have other gradations for the lights a small one to the details a nice round one to do broader areas the face is obviously now missing color mixing volume first i'm going to do the verdasho and i want to leave that verdash was an under painting but with volume with everything that i want to have underneath the flesh colors that will come on top of that [Music] these smaller spaces require a smaller brush especially when there is a portrait commission i want to be very specific because the client wants to make sure they recognize the sitter every brushstroke should carry the spirit of the piece and if she's smiling i'm looking always for areas that look like a smile feel like a smile so everything flows together and help her expression as well everywhere is going to carry that energy that the subject is carrying once the head is done my intention is to go and do the hair but i want to be able to work on the background and have that sky the way i want it so that then i can work around the hair once we are happy everything is happy around us the same is opposite when you're depressed even things that you used to like become depressing so when we feel something inside everything is projected like that outwardly a cloud that echoes that kind of form of the smile plus also giving a sense of wings imitating the dove i'm gonna use manganese blue for the sky i can't wait to finish this one to start my new tube a little bit of ivory black it's a cool black white by the way i'm using oil paints i'm going to use this yellow which is a yellow ochre and in the sky there is yellow blizzarding crimson here it's a very strong red it can give me nice pinks the sky is going to be lighter towards the horizon and in the distance it looks lighter and more the brush fill in the air instead of just filling in a blank area i make sure that my brush works work with the wind with my under painting i already put some yellow some purples with the blues and i'm creating a colorful sky i still want to have it naturalistic and of course in nature there's a lot of colors but they're very subtle i'll see how far i can push those colors and how subtle i can keep them it's good to get information from nature without reference it loses the naturalism of it i like to balance it in the way that i can create a world but will be ruled by natural law and that's my goal here if the sky is blue it's because that's the color of the space going up so that space is also in between us and the clouds so the clouds cannot be pure light it has to have an atmosphere big broad areas are made of smaller things atoms i guess is the smallest one we don't have to go that small but i think it's important to get the idea of little particles making the hole that way when we get to the big part was already made of a lot of good little thing [Music] on the wet sky i have sketched in four birds flying for ducks action as a symbol of her being four years old [Music] the idea of a pumpkin mixed with the architecture of the duomo might be a beautiful thing to add to the piece i can invent my own type of tree so i'm going to see if i can resemble a pumpkin and the dome at the same time then i can get some background color select the areas that i liked [Music] normally plants are grouped together and it's hard to separate them but when i see them like that even with a nice background that is dark i can see the drawing more and the details better i look for things like this so i can incorporate in the painting too i'm i'm gonna add a couple of butterflies i should add where they come from so that the metamorphosis is complete i like that nice little curve [Music] that's a surprise a panda reflected upside down in the water but he's not up there also i wanted to add a little bit of architecture underneath the water and civilization in this world that she's living the waves are idealized but i like to look at water i go out and see how waterfalls how water moves if you know the properties of water how water feels and look and what it does then create that movement and make it go wherever i want [Music] sometimes the palette becomes a little bit of what i'm painting and all these elongated brushstrokes can look a little bit like the grass and the garden i'm working on here i prepare my colors in the palette and then i place them and they feel more like the plants for the grass it's good to go outside and look at nature so you can see what happens the top part receives some of the reflex from the sky so it's cooler some highlights are cool others are warm if you can see through it then it's really high chroma and all these things are better studied from life i really like the curve the movement that is going up like that because that's what i want the flower to do to the eye this flower is kind of the closest accent that i have to start guiding the eye into the composition as i move the brush i try to make a feel also like if the wind is hitting it so that the movement of the flower's growth gets recorded as i paint it the trees are moving masses i came to the park to check out those masses moving and then i can select which masses to put where to give that sense of the palazzo vecchio i'm putting her dogs in a specific place in the composition to create a tension point looking towards my main character to balance that i created the book with the pages flying towards her that way she keeps her importance in the composition it's good to call the attention even more than the other ear because this one is closer to us in this case it's good that the edge is strong because it brings the dog forward and i can put some of the sky color in some areas of the ear to integrate it now is the time to add those pinks and reds and bring this to a more fleshy feel the verdascio which is a an idea of the monochrome to deal with values and to deal with information that structure underneath for that background to exist everything has a background people have backgrounds images also have backgrounds adding colors on top of this the pinks the yellows all those cools in darker halftones turning away from the light and that gives a sense of real flesh [Music] when there is nothing that caused my attention as not being part of the whole then is in harmony and that's what unity is to see it evolve from this line work to get forms we have detected differences in how we feel with them look at a big tree it gives us a different feeling that a smaller plant architecture from greece is different from the gothic period they do impact us in different ways when i'm composing i'm selecting shapes that i like to see that i imagine just as when we look at outside natural things they all look beautiful that's why people love nature and art they have something in common which is place the spirit through those forms giving us feelings so thank you anthony de stefano it was a great pleasure to paint this and i hope she likes [Music] you

Channel: Cesar Santos

Views: 21,685

Keywords: Cesar santos, santocesart, art, oil painting, painting, realism, artist, contemporary, portrait, syncretism, Miami, cuba, American, Cuban, Cuban American, winsor and newton, old Holland, mussini, florida, instructional, how to paint, theory, how to, ideas, classical, master, old, new, talking about art, vlog, fine art, colors, America, usa, artista, face, figure, arte, drawing, girl, pets, dogs, portrait commission, anthony, destefano, bestselling, author

Id: Kdss7YQlcjw

Length: 11min 42sec (702 seconds)

Published: Fri May 27 2022