How to Paint Glass - Oil Painting Demonstration

[Music] so in this video i'm going to paint this little painting of a mason jar on a simple background to show you how i paint glass and before we get into that i just want to very briefly tell you that i've been really tied up with carter art academy and also geneva fine arts supplies we've really been trying to keep up with orders as best we can and things have really uh turned around for us and we've been able to now sort of catch up but thank you guys for your patience out there on dealing with that and without further ado let's get into how to paint glass so i'm starting by pre-mixing some colors but not very many you know when i teach my method to people who are learning to paint for the first time or or just people learning my method i highly recommend pre-mixing all your colors for all the various parts of whatever painting but the way i paint is i just uh you know give myself a smear of color to look at i but you know this is with my experience so um just giving myself some real basic colors uh there's there's going to be a lot of variation here this is the you know because this glass is transparent glass the cloth colors are basically the same as the glass colors other than the reflections and the uh and in some of the reflections there's some room colors that are being reflected but otherwise it's all the same color table color is a little different but these are my basic background colors so i'm going to pencil in again this is just me giving myself a few marks i'm not using a pencil i'm just going to do this all with my paint brush getting my proportions right i use a proportion divider not always you can use your brush handle and your thumb to measure you know if you're working from life and you can compare the width to the height and and do it that way but you know i'm just giving myself a few marks i went down in the bottom i've painted the table edge far too low so i'll adjust that later but i'm really thinking about just proportions um you know height to the width width of the of the neck up in the top of the bottle you know where's this oval positioned and you know once you have a few marks the rest all falls into place pretty easily so this is i'm using burnt umber as my pencil just because uh you know it it plays nice with other colors it doesn't milk things up you know i wouldn't want to use like a straight up black because the all the blue in there would be fighting with my with my oranges and and you know brown is orange anytime you you see brown that's just on the orange side of the color wheel so starting to fill in and at this point i uh um didn't realize that my table was too too low and i'll adjust that later always working dark to light normally i would recommend that you paint all the background around an object before you paint it but in the case of glass because it's see-through you know it's all the same you know you could almost treat the cloth and the glass as one object there's some reflective colors here and there but basically all those cloth colors are represented in the in in the glass table colors are a little different but i'll mix those later if you work dark to light you will see your subject develop in front of you in other words if you're jumping all over you won't be able to really judge the shape of the jar you know if you're doing portraits this is especially true you'll never see a likeness um you know when you paint somebody if you're if you're painting in your darks and your lights and you're jumping all over the place you won't see the face develop and that's true in the case of still life's as well if you work dark to light you will begin to see the shape of the object and be able to make adjust adjustments accordingly as opposed to just jumping all around plus you know once you put in those lighter colors they um they will pollute your shadows and they're just hard much harder to deal with so i'm always holding off on my uh you know on the lights especially the highlights you'll notice i'm going to wait until the very end to put those highlights in and you really can't even judge the jar you know when when you're putting when you're putting in your values you cannot judge those values whether they're right or wrong really until you get the canvas covered so of course if you're painting for the first time or learning my method for the first time um you absolutely want to work dark to light and don't jump ahead and start putting in your lights i'm going to really hold off on putting in any of those reflections just trying to put in my dark values first you can see how quick i'm doing it i'm not in any way trying to verbatim paint the shapes and that i see in the jar i'm just kind of laying in those values i'm doing it quickly i'm maintaining the abstraction here i'm actually mixing my color on the canvas which is always nice because it it just gives you all this non-monochromatic color you know your color's got a lot of natural variation when you paint it on the canvas or mix it on the canvas and that's something you know i wouldn't i wouldn't recommend my students do that um in the very beginning but you know as you um paint and as you start to get a feel for color just go for it and just you know it's very easy to change color in a wet oil painting and you're going to see me do some of that later but you know my colors may be too brown now but i can put the gray in later very easily and also you know if you just have if you just mix your colors and you just lay them in and you don't put any variation in it you know you can get this monochromatic color that's not natural looking and if you do get your color wrong when you adjust it it it will put all this variation into the color so for instance you can see one side is more orange more brown the other side's more green and it's a lot more variation in my painting than it is in the source but that's okay because uh you know i can i can adjust that later my paintings always tend to have a little bit more color separation no matter where it is and i and i see that in in the great artists like sergeant and reppin and all my all my favorite artists are you know you see uh you know you could you could almost call them at color accidents or whatever but as they're putting them in like i'm doing now and just kind of boldly laying that color in letting the canvas show through i'm not worried about my color being perfectly accurate you know i can i can adjust it later the main thing i try to do is maintain the abstraction and leave some surface texture in the painting no matter what it is so you don't want to get all blendy blendy with it and turn your painting into uh where you lose that surface texture the viewer always wants to have something that their eye can grab onto and it doesn't matter if the surface texture matches the thing you're painting for instance the surface texture of my painting does not match the source in the cloth you know it's a lot mine's a lot more edgy and lumpy and everything else but as long as i've got abstraction in there as long as my values are basically put in right then that's where the you know that's the magic of painting in a way because you can as long as you get your values put in right you can get away with with anything almost so as i lay in these uh this cloth color i'm not attempting to paint the texture of the cloth as i see it i'm not trying to paint that surface i'm just boldly laying in my values wherever they wherever they are and and when i'm done i'm gonna look for the places where i've got the value wrong and uh if you get your values right then things start looking realistic you don't have to paint the surface texture you can go look at all the great artists like sergeant or whoever and if you look at their work in detail you get in there close they don't paint the texture of of whatever it is whether it's a human skin or hair or cloth or whatever it is so i am not attempting to paint that but i am leaving um some surface texture in my paint you know i'm not getting all blendy blending in fact i think in this part here i i do get a little more blendy than i probably should have you really you got to have that little bit of edginess that little bit of crispy surface texture that you see everywhere and then other than that i'm just going after my values and trying to fix those and i don't really get my values perfectly right in this painting you know it's a cloth in the background it's not that important to me but you know once i as long as i've basically put my values in and once i get this canvas covered i can step back seven feet away and then see see where my value problems are and then adjust them so finally mixing up some lighter colors that are going to be you know in the cloth i'm i've really held off i don't have any light light colors yet so these are the first light colors that have a significant amount of white in in those colors and once i put those in then i really can't play very much because that titanium white and it doesn't matter what kind of white it is will milk up all my shadows so i'm being very careful here and only putting these colors where they belong you know trying to keep a little bit of abstraction but being very careful now i'm going back to my darks before i get too far but notice how rough this painting is at this stage it's very rough but my values are basically being put in they may not look right at this point they might look too dark or whatever it is but that's only because i don't have all the the surrounding colors put in and i haven't covered the canvas with paint once i cover the canvas with paint it's going to be a lot easier to see you know where the value problems are i painted this um pretty quickly i think the total time that i spent on this was about two hours and 15 minutes probably at least 30 or 45 minutes of that time was you know me cleaning brushes or you know changing my music selection or whatever it is that i was doing so i got to be really careful here when i put this in you'll notice how i change my brush stroke a lot i'm really trying to get that variation you know i don't this this is how you create abstraction you don't have a regular up and down brushwork brushstroke that just goes across the canvas you you vary it you change it you let the but i'm but i'm making sure that that texture's in see i'm almost taking it out too much right there you got to be really careful you don't want to ever get all blendy blendy with it so again building the shadows you know putting in the dark bits before i get into any of the lights um you know i i decided to finish the cloth so i got into some of those lights but now i'm back to putting in my values in the right order keeping it abstract you'll notice my brush moves in odd ways it jiggles it drags it scratches it wiggles and that's all in an effort to create this this irregular brush work or abstract brush work sometimes people ask me you know how should i stroke my brush and i tell them you can use any brush stroke you want you want as long as you maintain the abstraction and and that you are you know putting your values in where they where they need to go but look what a mess the jar is at this point that's uh you know just just by putting your values in boldly you can really get away with so much and by no means am i getting these um or my colors or my values you know exact you know the holy grail of painting is not getting perfect color in fact if you mess up your color it just gives you an opportunity to go in and change it and when you do change it you get less monochromatic color so there's nothing wrong with uh you know you can go examine the great artist and they change color by putting little by you know you can just alter it easily like if you decide your color needs to be more green you can just get some strong green and just start to work it into that wet paint just a little dab of here a little dab there it can be all separated out but when you step back from seven feet away you get the color shift and you'll see me do some of that in the background here in this painting so these five colors these are geneva fine art colors they're they don't have uh any solvent in them so they're they don't have the toxic fumes and they're already got the medium mixed into them that makes it nice and easy to squirt it out and use it and the five colors that i'm using you can mix any color in the world with those colors uh with the exception of really powerful pop colors you know like if you need a crazy super bright green you know like a coming through a stained glass window or something you may need to go get some you know power green or whatever but these colors will mix any color in the world other than super powerful colors like you know super pop orange coming through a stained glass window or traffic cone green or you know anything like that you need special pigments for but otherwise when i did portraits i would say that 9 95 of all my portraits i never used anything but these five colors to mix every color in every portrait i ever did and they weren't exactly these colors always because these colors are actually i like these colors better than the ones i used to paint with but base this basic cadmium yellow a bright cadmium yellow you know permanent alizarin makes a good red this is pyro rubine which makes some really good bright pop reds but french ultramarine burnt umber it's the only colors you need except for the super bright colors so laying in these shadow colors again it's almost like the base i'm always airing on the side of being more dark you know i'm gonna i'm holding off on laying in the light parts once i have a nice base then i'll come in and put the bright bits in so notice how rough the entire jar is at this point and how you know i don't have the reflection that stain color is far from white but just by leaving those little bits done you can start to see the the jar take shape and when you really want to judge your work you really need to get back about seven feet away and look at it you know what you see sitting in your chair or standing up close with your nose and your painting is not what matters and you'd be surprised that you know you might look at something and up close and you just not happy with it at all and you step back and it's completely different has a completely different look if you like to sit down while you paint like i do then the best thing is to have a hard floor and a chair with rollers on it so that you can roll back and see your painting from from a distance so finally putting in the light bits on this table and you can see how careful i am i'm getting i'm staying away from that glass because it goes slightly dark as it approaches the glass and i really should have put those in first i almost never use detail brushes in fact i can't even think of the last time i use detail brushes i smallest brush i'll ever use is like a number two or a number three and um i have a lot of students that love to use detail brushes and i always tell them you know when you use a detail brush you're like it's like you're painting lines it's like a pencil or a pen you know it draws lines it doesn't paint shapes but a brush you can touch the very tips of the bristles and like i'm doing here and draw a nice line that's got more of an abstract shape to it or an abstract pattern you know those bristles are irregular and every time i touch the canvas as you can see here i'm creating these little abstract blob blobs of paint you know and that is what you want if you paint with a detail brush you're just painting little lines has a whole different effect so even you know when i was painting portraits when i'm painting eyes or putting the reflection on in an eye or whatever it is painting jewelry i always used you know nothing smaller than a than a number two or a number three like the brush i'm using now and you can see when i touch the canvas it creates these little abstract you know flicks of color and that's what you want you don't want to paint lines and i'm holding off on that really light color still building my base notice how the little bits where i touch the canvas how abstract the little shapes are and the colors are you can't do that with a detail brush and notice that i'm holding it on edge and if you do have to paint a super thin line you can always bump it around with the background and and you know push it into place but all of this bottom of this jar is being painted with these larger brushes no detail brushes and that's why if you look at the whole general shape of it all it's got that abstract look to it and that's what makes it look real amateurs tend to put far more pattern than is really there in other words they they define things more they take away the abstraction i learned that when i was young in my portrait career and i was trying to i was making up a window to put in the back of a painting and it was just making it up out of my head and i painted this window looking at a sergeant window in a book and using that as inspiration when i was done i couldn't figure out why mine was so less much less appealing and then i realized that sergeant had all this abstraction in his painting so you know painting wet and wet is just wonderful i mean even now you can see i just just letting those light bits you know just ever so slightly blend into the wet paint underneath it but you can see how easy it is to paint wet on top of wet you know it's uh it's not a problem at all so i saw a little bit of green in the reflection in the glass and i've kind of exaggerated a little bit and i can bring that down later so once uh these reflections start to go in it really starts to look like glass and then you know if you wanted to paint a really loose painting you would paint these reflections in and walk away and leave it all you know super loose but i decided to poke at it for a while and you know i think the finished painting is pretty loose but it's not as loose as i sometimes paint and this painting you know up close it looks pretty loose but if you see it from eight feet away it's almost you know comes across as being um you know very realistic anyway so these aren't the whitest whites that i can paint but they're close to it and again it took a long time to get to this point i built up that base that i was going to paint this on top of one of the nice things i like about the stain color that i that i use um and that i you can get from geneva fine art but the stain that i paint this canvas with is a really wonderful color you'll see places in the in the table but also in the glass where i've left blank bits of canvas showing through and it just works wonderfully if you want beautiful color you start with dirty colors and then you put the the bright or strong colors in on top at the end but if you just are painting everywhere with vibrant colors you have nowhere to go and the color is far less appealing and that's a i guess a matter of taste but so now i'm fixing some value problems in the shoulder there and just tweaking my reflections you know kind of maybe putting in a little bit of detail at this point um and then just uh you know poking out my painting basically and making it look like the source now is the time when you can use your judgment when you're covering the canvas with paint you should be trusting your color checking and just uh you know checking all every stroke especially if you're starting out with my method you know you can check your colors by using a color checker if you're working from life if you're working from a photograph you can laminate the photograph and put your spots right on the photograph and check your colors i did a little bit of color checking on this painting myself but you know i've have a lot of experience so i'm you know just kind of going going with my instinct but that's but if you're starting off you absolutely should do color checking color check and there's no better way to understand color and understand values and everything else than checking your colors right off your photograph or if you're working from life you can use a color checker you can make one yourself i've got videos on how to make a color checker you can go look up so when i step back and try to decide what's wrong with my glass or what i want to change about it you know i'm stepping back from seven feet away and i'm looking at it and i'm saying where are the value problems and i look for places where i've got my the dark or the light wrong whether it's either too dark in my painting or whether it's too light and then i go in and change those no matter how much i like my painting you've got to fix those value problems don't ever think that you're that your painting is better than your source in terms of values so i'm going to make a color adjustment here i'm mixing up some nice purple it's not the strongest purple i can make but it's you know basically i might have had a little bit of dirt in my brush but it's ultramarine red and white and now i'm going to adjust this color and add some this is what i was speaking about earlier earlier about making color adjustments so just by putting a little bit of purple here and there i don't have to repaint the whole glass by any means it will shift all of the color toward the purple when you step back and i can do that in the background i can do it anywhere and i might put it in a little strong and then take it back out but you know it's this is a wonderful way to to adjust color you don't have to go in and repaint the whole area you just whatever direction you want to push it you load your brush up with that strong color and then you go in and put in a few spots here and there and everything else you can see now i've got the purple shift on the left and the right and look how long i held off before i put these light flicks in there got to build your foundation first i think the thing i see very often in my students whether it's my private classes here in austin or my online classes i see that my students will exaggerate their their like especially if they're painting glass they're going to go and put in all the bright bits first because it's all they can see and they're so anxious to put their reflections in but it's the very last thing you do so this painting is a finished and here is a still of the finished painting as you can see i've left it pretty loose it's loose when you look at it up close but when you step back away from it from seven feet away hopefully it all kind of falls together so here's the finished painting thank you guys for watching i'll see you guys in the next one you

Channel: Draw Mix Paint

Views: 274,967

Keywords: mark carder, carder method, oil painting techniques, realism, fine art, learn to paint, how to paint, brushwork, artist, geneva fine art, geneva fine art supplies, geneva paint, limited palette, paint, painting, oil paint

Id: fAMtjvxQWjE

Length: 32min 6sec (1926 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2020