How to Paint Fabric - Painting Demonstration

[Music] so the first thing about painting fabric and I always have to say this no matter what you're painting and then the general rules about oil painting are the same it doesn't matter whether you're painting fabric or trees or somebody's face you're putting in values you're leaving them alone you're not blending you're doing all the same rules that I teach in all my videos furthermore in this video I did premix some basic colors as you can see when you when when you see the palette you'll see my colors laid out but in general I'm not doing all the color checking that I would expect somebody who I was teaching or who was doing my method for the first time I would expect for them to do a lot more color checking to go a lot slower and to basically follow my method as its as its laid out in the three videos on my site how to paint an oil how to draw a proportion and how to mix colors from life and those videos are all youtube videos that are free to watch but you can find them on draw mix paint calm and they're all three of those videos are highlighted so that's my core method and I always said I just want to make sure that that you understand that this is a little bit more me just going for it just doing my thing I'm not checking colors like I expect my students to do and if you don't know what color checking is all about you can go watch some of my other videos where I explain how to do that in general if you're working from life you can use a color checker which you can make for yourself and I have a video that explains that or you can work from a photograph and in that case you can put your little spots of color right on a laminated photograph to check color so but as I lay in these colors as you can see starting with the darks putting in my very darkest colors first and then going and putting in the next lightest color etc etc and just kind of moving from black up into the lights I always paint dark to light there's a lot of reasons for that number one it's much much easier to put a light color on top of a dark color rather than vice-versa so I'm just laying in these dark colors I didn't do any penciling on this I'm just kind of penciling you know just freeform I'm not I'm just doing my thing the penciling isn't really too complicated on this buy it again if you want to see how to pencil and how to learn a pencil go watch my video how to draw in proportion because in this video I'm not doing any drawing while I'm drawing but I'm drawing with the brush so just I'm always modifying my colors as you can see so I'm shifting it toward the yellow or toward the green because I see some color shift in the fabric so I can take the original fabric colors that I mixed and just modifying and you'll see me doing that over and over and over again it doesn't matter what I'm painting so and that's just because I saw some some of that color in there so you'll notice that I do do some blending when I paint but it's not I always leave the texture in and you'll notice that even in my the way I move my brush I am in very careful not to over to soften everything up where you lose the texture or whether you lose the surface and that goes for anything it doesn't matter if you're painting fabric that's as smooth as it can be as you lay in your values you lay them down and you do not blend and this is my method there are other people that would tell you to do otherwise but I really feel it's important to lay down all your values all your colors you know just almost like patchwork just lay them in and then once you've got your canvas covered then you're then you can blend and play and but before then it's best just to focus on getting your values right and you can see how much time I spend on the palette and you know I didn't even show you guys in this video all the time that I spent on the palette not even close but I do show a few times like this this is the kind of thing I'm always doing always playing with my color you know it's especially true with faces but in fabric where you have all these reflections you know you can you can look into that source picture that I'm working on and see the the purples or the pinkish colors as they reflect off the table in the shadow so I just mix some general fabric colors and then I modify them as I go so again really checking your values if you're doing this and you want to paint fabric you absolutely need to learn to see your values and the best way to do that is through color checking it's not something that that you'll do for the rest of your you know life as an artist I certainly don't and in fact I encourage my students to leave color check in behind but as a as a way to learn and as a way to see values there's no better way so if you were painting this fabric and you didn't have the experience I had I would highly recommend that you do a lot of color checking putting little spots on your photo or whatever it is there's no better way to learn to see value quickly so as you notice I'm laying in these colors I'm not blending I'm leaving them alone and I'm painting what I refer to as painting ugly meaning that up close when you're sitting in your chair and this is real important especially for something like fabric where you know you even like really smooth fabric with with smooth transitions and and and everything you you do not go in and start blending you just lay in your patchwork of color leave it alone and then once all the canvas is covered you can go in and do some blending but it's best to leave that till the end and you'll notice you know you'll see me blend like like right here as I drag my brush across that division lines because I'm working wet and wet in fact one of the nice things about working white and white is you get a lot of natural blending you get a lot of colors mixing into each other because you're painting wet into wet and that's that's a great thing so here I'm putting in some purples as you can see there the reds you know the red shift and I did not the photograph that I've put up here on on the screen for your benefit so you can see what I'm working from is not a perfect reproduction of what I was looking at the the colors are a little different in the photo than they were in the source that I was looking at and so therefore you know you'll notice there are some slight differences in how I lay in the colors but in general you'll see the color shifts and you'll see how I deal with them I'm not laying in my darks in perfect order I try to work dark to light but if you look carefully you'll notice that I'm not I'm not following that rule to the letter I'm jumping around a little bit as I go but it's really something that you should avoid as much as you can because if you put in your values in order meaning from dark to light you will begin to see your subject just like you can now you can look at the fabric and you can compare my painting easily the shapes and the lines and and everything to the source and the reason you can do that is because I've laid in my darks in order if I had jumped all around and put in the lights and put in some darks here and there and and it was just all over the place you would not be able to see this fabric develop in a three-dimensional way the way that you can you can now and that's especially true for portraits where you're trying to keep a likeness and it's just easier to work dark to light I've found I couldn't work any other way I mean if you if you have a light color and you're trying to blend a dark color into it you get a lot of milk but if you go the other way around you get a lot less milk it's just easier so as you can see I'm really kind of taking it almost too far with that yellow and the green I've definitely exaggerated it from the source and I probably did that knowing that I'm gonna come back in with some of that reddish purple shift color and and bump into it and take that some of that down but you know in the end I think I did separate my color a little more than was in the source photo so avoiding the lights until the very end the other nice thing about doing that is it keeps you from milking up your your shadows you know it's it's almost like you really want to hold off so in terms of as far as painting fabric goes and what's unique about fabric and you know to anything else and there's not a lot you know painting is painting and I always have to remind my students about that in my private workshops that it's not you know painting is is laying color down putting in your values and it doesn't matter what you're painting what happens with fabric is you get a lot of reflection you get a lot of reflection as the fabric folds reflect upon themselves you get these unusual shifts in color that are so wonderful you can see you know light fabrics especially white fabrics creamy fabrics like this one you can see the shifts in the color a lot more where it for instance the purples and the and the yellows and I've kind of exaggerated that as you can see but I think I may bring that down a little bit as I work it's very tempting to put in your lights it's very tempting to just go in and start putting in the the highlights because there are a lot of times they help define what you're looking at but I try to avoid putting in my lights until the very end now I've put them in over on the left there as you can see and as again I'm not following my rules perfectly I'm painting little sections at a time for the for this video it it it worked out better if I painted the left half and then the right-half so that I could put up a nice source photo for you to look at now here I'm correcting my penciling which I don't know what I did but I got that wrong but I'm gonna paint the left half of this fabric painting and then I'm gonna finish the right half which didn't have quite as much detail in it a lot of times I've well not a lot of I've seen comments where people ask me you know why if you're looking at my brush it sort of hesitates it jiggles around it jumps all over the place some of that is me sort of trying to put a paint with an abstract stroke but a lot of times what's happening is I'm looking at the at the source and I'm trying to figure out what I should do and so my brush jumps around while I'm doing that so I don't know if that's been confusing anybody but I have seen a few comments asking what I'm why my brush jiggles around so much and this video is about I think it's about 40 something minutes long and the painting itself I think took me about four full hours to paint so I've reduced four hours down to about 40-something minutes now a lot of that is just me wiping my brushes on paper towels or you know glancing down at my my phone to check an email or whatever it is but in general that's mostly when the cameras are running I'm busy usually so about four hours to paint this now if you were painting with my method for the first time I would expect you to it for you to take a week but then as you paint and as you learn the method and you begin it you start to get it and you start to see you'll the the speed will come very quickly you know by the third painting you're painting twice as fast as you did on your first one and then after about six months you really speed up a lot this is actually a very quick method for painting I mean I don't know I suppose they're people that could paint this faster than four hours but in general to do realism like this that's pretty quick a lot of that is just you know wet and wet laying your colors down getting them right the first time and those are all good habits that I've learned from my early days of color checking and you know when I used to do portraits I always would sit down with my clients and do all this colored color mixing in color checking with with with my brush but I just can't recommend it enough for learning to see values so the line the fold line there the dark line that I'm painting around whenever you see a line like that and if you look over there on the source photo the tendency is to paint those sorts of lines much darker than they really are so that goes back to my number one what's the difference question that doesn't get asked so in other words when you're looking at your source and you're painting and you're asking yourself what's the difference between the two and you're trying to make your painting look more like the source the number one question that doesn't get asked is which is more subtle so in other words if I see a reflection line on the fabric mine should not stand out any more than it does in the source and that shadow line the crease line and the fabric there should not stand out anymore in my painting than it does in the source so in my private classes I tell all my students I try to tell all of them that they should get an index card and write which is more subtle on it and stick it to their studio wall because it's the one question that people forget they'll they'll get everything right about their painting but then they've exaggerated something so if you see those little you know folds and then you know what I'm working on the texture they're in the fabric those little lines that you see in the source they should be just as subtle when I paint them and that's it's so easy to exaggerate things so easy so after you put in your color you know and you've covered your canvas and you're trying to figure out what's wrong with your painting never forget to ask which is more subtle doesn't matter what it is it can be a glow in a teapot it can be a you know reflection in this case on the fabric in the shadow whatever it is one of the things that I think separates the best the very best realism from very good real realism is that ability to paint with a subtle where you're where there's all the subtlety where a line on somebody's forehead a wrinkle on a forehead is not exaggerated in your painting all these little creases in the fabric should not be exaggerated they should not stand out more in my fabric than they do in the source and the biggest part of that is first of all getting your values right so if you're checking your colors you know don't just assume a line as a dark line go and check it and find out exactly what it is because things tend to be you know you see a dark line and you think it's a lot darker than it is so as you see as I'm as I'm painting I'm I am doing some blending and you know I think that there's a it's not you know the worst thing in the world you can do if you know what you're doing and you're not polluting your shadows then you can sort of blend as you go but what I tell my students and this is absolutely critical is I will not went when people take my private class I will not let them blend now they they do and I'll stop them and you know they'll they'll you know they may have bad habits or whatever but I always will point out that they're over blending I say first you lay in your cup colors you cover your canvas you do not blend you do not play do not fix you cover your canvas and you move on and then once the canvas is covered then then you are much better you have a much better ability to see what's wrong with it because all your values are put in so I've basically finished that left side of the painting there and I'm just laying in some more color you know getting in the lights very carefully a lot of the way that my brush dances around is trying to maintain an abstract stroke now that's something that I've developed over years there's a lot of different ways you can stroke your brush and there's no right or wrong I know great artists that jab their brushes on this great artists that pull their brushes you know there's every kind of brush stroke Under the Sun and there's I don't believe there's any right or wrong about what type of stroke that you have but what I will say is that I have noticed an all grand grade abstraction in my it's my strong opinion that you must maintain an abstract brush stroke or an abstract pattern when you when you're painting in a pattern like I'm doing now in this fabric it has to be abstract and what I mean is it can't be regular what people tend to do as they paint is they tend to put in a stronger pattern that then is really there or they make the pattern more regular so it's they paint stroke stroke stroke and they'll sudden there's three lines in a row so it's sort of keeping that abstraction it's the same abstraction you see in nature you know if you look at a rock or a pile of leaves or anything really in nature you can see patterns just like you can see patterns and leaves and trees but there's an abstraction to it in that that is something that you know I need to make a whole video I've made videos where I talk a lot about it but I need to really demonstrate what that means but if you look at my brushwork you'll notice there's a there's a sort of a messiness to it that's hard to define and that's really important it's it's something that you know in something like this I'm trying to keep it as abstract as I see it so if you look at the source and you see that pattern of little shadow lines and everything else you know there's really not a regular pattern to it it's sort of just a mixture of shapes this canvas stain that I work on and this is all these are Geneva paints that I'm using and this is Geneva canvas stain but it's a really I really like the color for a lot of reasons it's a great neutral color it's also great for if it pokes through like you can see the canvas stain coming through in certain parts where I don't and I'm sure that you could go up to my finished painting and find little bits of bare canvas poking through here and there but it's wonderful the way it works with with almost all colors special especially neutral colors like this I mean it would be so much harder to paint this on a white canvas this makes it so much easier and these paints the Geneva paints that I'm using you know I we manufacture them right here in Austin Texas Geneva Fine Arts com but they they are they already have the media mixed into them so I've seen comments where people are asking me why how do I get my paint so fluid well this Geneva paint has medium already mixed into it so I just squirt it out and it's ready to go I don't have to mix you know anything else into it to thin it down like you do with normal paint and the other nice thing about this paint is it's doesn't have any harmful fumes so there's no salt solvents in it there's no mineral spirits there's no turpentine or anything like that and that makes it really nice because you don't you can use it in a without any risk of toxic fumes so just finally laying in the highlights which is always a lot of fun to do you know you hold off for so long and then putting in the highlights as heat is what typically sets everything off and even when I'm putting in these highlights you'll notice I kind of put it in in a little with a little bit of abstraction I don't just draw a white line you know I I kind of lay it in and I look in a you know an abstract way fabric especially is something where you can't exaggerate your lines if I go back and look at my very first paintings where I painted fabric that was the thing I did over and over is I exaggerated every crease every crease was darker every fold had a darker shadow and you know I just exaggerated everything it took me a while to figure that out but especially in fabric I mean you can you can paint a whole painting and then when it comes down to fabric its fabric and hands people tend to exaggerate the the shadow lines on hands they tend to make the shadows between the fingers darker and they tend to exaggerate the wrinkles and the veins and everything else that you see in hands in fabrics the same way people tend to make the shadow lines darker and delineate everything more define everything more and it's all about that subtlety I wanted to tell you that red color that you see there in the video for some reason my camera makes our red color look a lot lighter than it really is and we've had questions in the past about if you buy the Geneva red paint it it looks darker quite a bit darker in real life than it does in these videos and that's because for some reason my camera will take that intense red color and lighten it and increase the value and make it a little bit lighter than it really is one of the nice things I like about bristle brushes and you see me doing it there is that because there's a little bit of stiffness to the brush you can almost use the brush to steady your hand you know you can you can let the tips of the bristles rest on the canvas and sort of help steady your hand as you're drawing a line see how subtle those little reflections are it's so easy to just make that way brighter than it should be you know even when you're painting reflections you're holding off you're holding off you're waiting to the very end to put it in those lightest lights I mean as you can see I've basically done with that part of the fabric and now I'm finally putting in the crispy lights and that's the only time in my opinion to do it there's no point putting in those lights early see that color is probably a lot lighter then you might think it is that's just you know with the more you use color checking you know as you're learning the more you start to be able to see these values in these colors for yourself you stop being surprised you know the first time you start color checking and you check a color you're always surprised I mean that's my students who don't have a lot of experience with my method that come and take my private class they you know I hear the comment over and over again it's like oh I didn't believe you know how how how dark this is or how light this is depending on you know what they're painting and what the particular optical illusion that's going on in their painting is in there and it's happening all the time I mean every time you see a dark color next to a light color there's an optical illusion that's fooling you and telling you that you're seeing something you're not but the more color checking you do the more the less surprised you are the more you put a color up and in the beginning it's you're always surprised but after you've painted 20 still lifes you're not surprised anymore in fact that's when you start to be able to see the color for yourself where you can you know an artist who can look at a look at some fabric look into the shadow mix that color up on their palette first shot and and get it right that is a wonderful skill to have and you can anybody can develop that skill but you've got to do some color checking to start with I mean there are other ways certainly to do it you know just from experience and you know trial and error and everything else but the color checking is just gets you and it just cuts right to it and and teaches you very quickly to see values so there's a little bit of blending as you can see so I do blend but if you look at the blending that I do I always leave the surface in there you don't want to soften it up where it loses the texture you always got to have the texture I think there's you know maybe if you're painting an egg and you're going for really high realism that might be a time when you would you know maybe not paint with texture but even then you know if you get up right up to the egg it's it's better if there's some very slight texture that goes obviously for cloth as well so the lines on the table which you can't see in this source photo but they're very subtle they're very very subtle you can almost hardly see them and that again it goes back to that painting subtle not exaggerating things you know in my class there's you know it were my students paint these still lifes they that's the first thing that they learn is is paintings this subtle because if somebody if you were painting this this table for instance in those little very very delicate lines that you see those lines are so easy to exaggerate so now working on the remaining half of the painting just laying in my colors I just painted that black I did not I think there was some black fabric behind there but I just painted it black you know painting on a stained canvas makes all the difference for being able to see your values if I was painting that gray on a white canvas it would look like one step from black and I'm not kidding it's it's like literally make some huge difference so one of the nice things about painting on this neutral stained color is that you see your darks as dark and you see your lights as light meaning that the colors that are lighter then the stains stand out as a light color and I mean can you imagine oh if you painted even a color that was slightly off from white on a white canvas it'll look like a dark color even though it's maybe a very bright color only one step or two steps from white so it's much easier to see your values in my opinion on a stained canvas rather than working on a white canvas you can see what a mess my palate has become I think a lot more yellow in the source that I was looking at then rather than this photo that I've got pasted up here see this is where blunt working wet and wet is so nice because as you can see I'm putting in little bits of color but because it's going into that wet pane it kind of dissolves into it nicely so I'm not blending but it has a nice blending effect as you like color and it's very natural to to blend you know as you as you lay in color I just you know advised against intentionally going in and smoothing things and playing with things and trying to change shapes and everything else by blending because you end up with a big soft blur it really takes away you've just got to have texture everywhere you have to have a surface that the viewer can look at and if you blend it up to super soft nothing they had they can't look at it they can't see the surface and for some reason we like to see the surface so there I'm breaking my rule I'm putting in the whites before I should don't ask me why I did that I really don't know why I decided to lay in that color I think maybe I wanted to know where that reflection line was and I'll be very careful when I do lay in the shadows but it really never hurts in fact I really do advise my students to work dark to light across the whole painting in this case the shadow colors or rather the stain color is sort of a nice shadow color so that's why I'm unable to go ahead and kind of start seeing the fabric and visualize it so big messy pallets are great it means you have more color to choose from so just a little bit of color right on that edge I don't know what I was saying it's hard to see it in the source but I was obviously thinking it needed a little more cream in there in that reflection again I think it's because my source was looked a little different to my eye than this photo does here that I've put in so I guess that's what you would call the blending you know that if you want to call this blending what I'm doing is I'm working into that shadow you'll notice I do get a little bit of blending but also notice how I keep some texture it's very careful it's it's part of the way part of the reason my brush is jumping around the way it is is because I'm being absolutely sure to keep a little bit of texture in there where I can see the surface the other thing you'll notice is that I've painted this whole thing with with large brushes I don't think I ever used in a very small brush at all and certainly not any detail brushes I generally try to advise my students to paint with as big a brush as they can stand you tend to paint your values and and focus on the big picture instead of the details when you use a larger brush and also it's easier to maintain the abstraction because with a big brush you can kind of roll it around and you're dragging and you're creating all these little odd shapes the smaller your brush gets the more your painting lines and your ear painting in lines and you're not painting in you know shapes and colors so let me just they talk about fabric and what makes fabric unique and that is really nothing to us it's it's no different the rules that I and and the method that I teach applies to fabric just as well as it does to a rock or two of somebody's face for that matter same same method same way you paint and everything else what I will say and that's possibly unique about fabrics is just how important it is and how easy it is to exaggerate your lines and your folds and and everything else so when you're done with your fabric and you step back across the room your fold should not be any more defined and they shouldn't stand out more that creases shouldn't be darker everything else so if anything I've exaggerated it less in other words if you look at the little creases in the shadow in the top right up there mine are a little bit more subtle and so it wouldn't have hurt for me to go in and actually make them a little more defined I certainly don't recommend painting softer or less defined than your source it's just far more common for for artists especially amateurs and people who are starting out to exaggerate things but if you look into the shadow and the fabric you'll notice that I did not exaggerate anything at all and I may have even made it a little bit less exaggerated maybe I should have defined it a little more going back in and putting in my crispy blacks it's always a good habit it's always you know it's so easy when you finish a painting take a look at all your blacks and if you need to go back in and put in some what I call crispy blacks or black blacks and it's uh it's a good idea to always remember to do that at the end of your you know whenever you're painting an object and you calling it done look at your blacks again pick up a clean brush and paint your blacks back in so there we go there's the finished painting thank you guys for watching I hope you learned a lot and we'll see you in the next one and by the way I have my own art supply company right here in Austin Texas and we manufacture all of our own products we have a whole line of paint and brush holders pallets color checkers all sorts of things so go check that out if you haven't at geneva fine art calm

Channel: Draw Mix Paint

Views: 235,025

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, paint, painting, paintings, mix paint, mix color, mixing color, mixing paint, color theory, color paint, color painting, oil paint, paint fabric, painting demonstration

Id: PSHej1Mkns0

Length: 43min 40sec (2620 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2019