How To Paint Portraits , What Beginner Artist Need to Know

join us on our website at www.airsofthero.com [Music] now why do we do it self-portrait because it's difficult and why is it difficult nobody wants to look at themselves that critically there like that intent like to study why is that you're in denial so we're going to call these denial paintings how's that self-portraits predominantly we're doing them as an exercise to learn how to do portraits now in my classes and when I do phone coaching the main emphasis is working from life in this classroom we don't get a chance to work from life we could but it's kind of difficult most of you are working from photographs that you've taken or paintings that you've done outdoors but in this classroom is really difficult to learn how to paint from life and so we've developed this part of the class so that you would go home and you would practice working from still lives but you know the big elephant in the room is that we there's portrait painters people love to do portraits and so how do we actually do that well if you were in a college they would have a lot of students that would take a class and the teacher would hire model and the model would stand there and could teach you that in this particular instance we don't have a model to work from so the only logical way of doing any kind of painting from life especially to do a portrait is to use yourself so you are the model for that to learn how to paint but the issue is is one of the biggest issues that I have with students when they bring it in is here well it doesn't look like me or I don't like to study myself or I don't like you know all these objections a lot of people don't want to do it because they're not wanting to sit and look at themselves or they're disappointed if it doesn't look like them so all of these excuses that they happen when giving us a homework assignment I said okay what we're going to do is we're going to do a self portrait meaning that you're going to use you as a model at no point that I ever have to say I never said that it had to look like you so these portraits it might be a fluke that you've got them to kind of look like you but that wasn't the goal the goal was actually used you as a model to learn how to work from life to do a self-portrait now some of you went ahead and started painting a self-portrait from a photograph that you took yourself so who did that that wasn't the homework assignment because we always work from life it's different if you set and paint it from a photograph that's very similar to what we do anyway so it doesn't matter the whole point is is trying to get a self-portrait now I can tell if it's done from life and not and when you go to the museum's right now there's a show of Van Gogh I think if the Legion of Honor is something and you know Rembrandt painting himself 87 times so you know when he couldn't find a model he would sit and it's not a bad idea in your studio to actually set up a nice big mirror not only to reflect your painting to see how a painting looks in Reverse if you're setting up a studio and you have a space for studio you should have your easel on one end and then a mirror on the other side just because you can look at the mirror and see a lot of mistakes but if you have a nice mirror just set up and when you go down to paint just turn around and do a nice also portrait of yourself it's just a really nice practice it doesn't have to mean anything the thing that shows up in a self-portrait is that it will never ever ever look like you to other people so all of these self-portraits that we look here we look at them and go what that doesn't really look like that person is this like to sell places I've done when people look at them they go that doesn't really look at like that but when I'm looking in the mirror that's what I say okay because what you're seeing is a reverse image than what I'm saying I'm seeing a reverse image in the mirror what you're seeing is a flip of that so in order for you to get a real self portrait painted from life from Amir you'd have to have two mirrors you'd have to have a mirror that you reflect yourself and then have a mirror that reflects your reflection and then pain from that that's really confusing so I highly don't recommend that the good thing about self-portraits though is that you know like Rembrandt self-portraits and all of the artists that have done self-portraits over the period of time is that they eventually die and we forget really what they look like so we adopt these backward paintings is what they look like when you're painting a painting from a photograph of somebody oftentimes you'll have that person go but that doesn't look like me and of course not it doesn't look like you because what you see in the mirror is a reverse images of that so the world doesn't see the way you see in fact have you ever gone clothes shopping and you stand in front of those three-way mirrors and you're looking in you're like who's that oh that's me you know because of the reflection is that that person in that mirror that's reflecting over there isn't the same person that you know like this but there's always a quality when you're doing a self-portrait that you can't substitute and when you do a self-portrait you're sitting there look in the mirror and you're staring at yourself and then you go and you paint that and so there's an intensity to self-portraits you can see them in the museum's you can always tell us the self-portrait enough because there's always this gleaming look at something casual unless they're really stone and they don't care but excuse me this healthy gritty non smiling face so there's always that intensity it's kind of practiced with a lot of artists that do portraiture and even landscape or just artists in general that they actually use those self-portraits as part of their marketing and so you'll see like Facebook Eric Rhodes who has plein air magazine he actually has a lot of artists that paint his portrait so he uses that for a lot of his marketing I think but the other artist actually will eventually paint the self-portrait and then you a facebook cover photo and it's not a bad idea to actually have that if you do a really beautiful self-portrait so nice thing they have if you're ever going to have a showing of your work and you'd have a nice portrait of yourself so I kind of invite you to try doing that it is a wonderful exercise there's a wonderful exercise and you can really start learning how to paint portraits well but you can't get caught up in the whole well it doesn't look like me in fact if you're going to start doing portraits you should never do portraits of anybody that you know so if you set your husband down and said I'm going to go paint you the entire time you're painting you're going to say to yourself this runs in your head he's going to look at it and laugh at it he's going to look at it and he's going to laugh at it and so the entire time you're not paying attention at least if you're going to laugh you're laughing at yourself if you're doing a self portrait but it's you don't have that intimidation if you're painting your kids you know you're going through scrutiny mom that doesn't look like me and when you're really burdened with that it's really hard to learn so if you want to learn how to do portraits best either do yourself in the closet quietly and don't show anybody or ten people you don't know until you know how to paint now the secret behind doing really good portraits is no secret at all it's drawing it's really drawing that's the main key to to doing that and you know we used to plus a proportional divider you can see where that becomes kind of handy and if you use the proportional divider you can actually does anyone have one Andy here yeah so we talked about using one of these if you're doing landscape painting but if you're actually looking in the mirror you can actually look at your mirror and you can measure off of that and then put this onto your canvas so you can actually use this tool to do your self portrait or even if I'm doing a portrait of somebody that's sitting from I can actually use this and close one eye the key to it those that you have to keep your arm and everything at a certain level in a certain place if you were actually going to do that I would recommend are you putting a footing underneath so that you know where your feet go and then an arrest of some kind like a music stand or something that kind of keeps your eye at a certain level so you can see model now you can go from the big site and make it smaller or you can do it this way take somebody as far away and doing bigger on your canvas so these things actually work for that too so it's not a bad thing to learn how to do portraits if you have your head cocked you have to make sure you always go back in that thing I always like it when you see artists with their hands and they're holding an easel and you know that they've had to sit there stare at it and then have to put that down pick up a brush and then paint what they remember so you have to work on your memory exercises but remember you're always doing memory exercise because you can't look in the mirror and paint at the same time so whatever you see you got to memorize and then move over so if you see if you're holding a palette and you see that you have to memorize that shape put it down pick up your brush and paint with it I think it's just best if you're going to do so portrait to have the hand you're going to put a hand in have it holding the brushes that you're using so that you can look and then immediately go over and try to not make it so complicated but it's an excellent exercise one of the rules that you want to keep in mind is that you never want to paint any face bigger than life-size that's the cardinal sin of a lot of people who are starting portrait painting it's got to be life-sized or smaller unless it's going someplace like on the ceiling where you can get far away from but for the most part you always want to have a life-size in smaller and then how many of you actually tried that new recipe for the portrait so you fail yellow green and alizarin crimson you did the old formula anyone did you try oh yeah that works really well the fatal yellow green and alizarin crimson anyone else you got the wrong colors then does that work good for you those colors you use that exclusively or did you change itself you're supposed to use you as a model I don't anticipate you being able to paint a self-portrait of yourself that looks like you the second class you're you're been here a three class I mean you're such a newbie the the fact that you have the fortitude to stand up and say here it is among some of your peers that actually can paint pretty well is awesome not that we judges so it was great a lot of people who would have taken the chance and so that's what's so incredible are you saying you should smile or you shouldn't I know you know I used to go when I was a little kid I used to go to my mom and I'd go you got wrinkled and she would go well there was a last line and that turned her and go mom nothing in this world is that funny she was German I think she threw a knife ebony so what she said was that she started working with the face and then she started mewling over the mouth as we can see and then she's like reworking the mouth and reworking them up so I could test with her mouth now and let me give you some hint is a definition of a porker pretty much is a painting that has something wrong with the eyes and the mouth so that's kind of the overall definition of a portrait the mouth and nose are very very difficult to do because we never look at them and when we do it's awkward I was having a conversation with you and I started looking at your mouth you you'd start doing that do I have something there then you start looking for the reflection in their eye to see if you got you know what that normally you don't want to concentrate on the mouth normally you don't want to concentrate on the nose and the ears because really the only thing that you really have to nail or the eyes and if you can nail at one eye just one eye the rest of it can all be bird because I can't see both your eyes at the same time and so if you take one eye and really do the detail on that and you'll notice that the paintings in the museum will have that you take one eye and really detail it the other eye disappears you didn't even notice you er will automatically go to that side you soften the nose and you soften the mouth and keep the viewer on the eye they won't notice that you fudge but what you did was you put so much emphasis on the mouth right that it's like and there's no way you can do anything with that the key to doing portraits is realizing that it is about just capturing one eye perfect outside of that you pretty much can start letting a lot of it go especially as a beginner student you don't have to put that much emphasis noses are really difficult because they kind of come at you normally artists been too much used too much space between here because they're trying to compensate for their nose which actually is pointed this way so I've actually had artists in class they're like drawing and they'll like draw their nose like this and then I'll put it on I think he doesn't know but the thing is when you go like this your nose is actually longer than if you point it downwards and the reason for that is because it's foreshortened a little and usually when anything is foreshortened it's kind of out of focus and when you start putting focus on the nose and starts looking like a pig snout because it is in a way you know pig snouts got now so you start putting the nostrils and all that stuff you kind of have to get it off of there just like you don't want to look at another person's nose nobody wants to see your nose either so so you kind of soften that the ears it can kind of look a little plenty but soften all of that air if you're going to be painting a hand what you want to do with the hand is that person you never show the fingers like this you never you don't have a hand like this what's a hat no matter what you do with the hand it looks like a claw and if you look at any hand for any period of time it starts looking like a claw and then people wonder why their paintings their hands are by claws because we have claws we have pig snouts and we have claws and so what we want to do is we want to blow and with the hands first thing always connect the fingers to a mass and then tip it under so always have the viewer shift under have the fingers together when you separate the fingers you're going to run into problems now if you get better with it you can make it more complicated some of those beautiful old masters paintings where the you know women are just touching a teacup or something they got these wonderful ham that takes practice whoo-whoo-whoo-whoo was up fabulous portrait painters spent most of his time in a studio doing studies of singing of hands and feet because he figures anybody who's going to do is a portrait has to do hands and feet and if you master that you can put the portrait anywhere but the hands and feet are the most crucial that when you first begin hold the fingers together and then simplify it look at this is a triangle and as a base and even the thumb if you can tuck it on there you're better off tuck the fingers over and then paint the thing in one color so a mass of color a mass of color so this would be darker mask lighter mass and then what you'll do is you'll actually put the highlights in on the fingers don't ever put the line in between the finger if you put the lines between the finger you'll end up again with another claw so you want to kind of paint the shadow of what that color is in between the fingers that you think is the dark color paint the whole finger those colors as a mass and then go through with your brush and just brush the flesh color in sections across there and give the feeling of the light gracing the top of those forms and then you'll have a nice hand to work okay so there's a lot of things so you've doing in class for three weeks there's no way you would have been successful without all of this talk at a time but because you spent some time doing the homework assignment and you were brave enough to bring it up here and expose yourself we got a chance to really talk about how important all these things are which we wouldn't have and so that's why even a bad painting can really give us an opportunity to look at how to paint something correctly so thank you for doing that a little different way you know when I went to the Academy of Art now it says this report we had to turn in our portfolio and part of our portfolios that you have to do a self portrait so I sat there and did a line drawing of a self-portrait and then when I got to class everybody has these really extraordinary visions of things I'm not going to not I'm not thinking like an artist now try to do something a little different now about the issue when we're painting all together as we paint what we think we see so with your painting too you're thinking oh my daughter looks like a part of you I look like a Barbie I don't have dark skin I have fair skin everybody wants fair skin honey and peaches and peaches and cream skin just like those gals who sell makeup right but in essence yes you have that but usually only little transitions so this is the color of your skin you could even test it on here but you would only have a little bit of that color right in there and then you have to go to shadow and you can see this is a little chalky because your shadows aren't warm enough okay so by bringing in some more darks in here we can actually get the form happen but it's real hard to do that because it's a mental switch and the only way you can do that is to have the the guts to pull out that dark color and stick it in now one idea when you're doing portraits is that lay the color in first and then sink take a dark color and sink this area and sink this area and put some color in there and just break that with dark tones here here here here keep this about the center of the head break this in half put a line there and there and just get those darks on there darken the sides of the face have a little bit of light try to get the darks in and then go in and start putting your eyes into those sockets but these planes here have to go back and so you want to lay those and shadow them up and then go and oftentimes what we do is we start off with the eyes and got a nice little drawing when you key and then we start going around the eyes and you kind of start when you're doing that kind of detail you start forgetting that all that is underneath the forehead and the eyebrows which is all designed so that your eyes are protected from Sun so that's all that's how you get that shade you got to go put that in there got to put sugar in here and and go dark it's easier to go take a painting that's dark and lighten it but when you start off like this it's really hard to go dark because your brain says oh no no no you're going to make it muddy you're going to do you get out psyche you don't want to end up with a face that's dirty but you know you got to practice this stuff that's why we do this that's why I think if you do if you do a self-portrait every two months it's just good practice you can't do this once every three years or four years or five years and expect anything and remember portrait drawing real life a lot and drawing you got a practice of stuff that kudos to you for doing that normally what you do is here's the head and then you cut it in half and number some people it's diver with me inside brows because other some people have these really wake up eyes yeah so if I go from here to here and you cut that in half that's where your nose is and then you cut that in half and you have your mouth those are just rough estimate welcome yeah and you know why you make the nose to lungs because your your thinking your nose is this long when in essence when you fold it up it is actually a lot shorter in this bridge this is the hardest space that people have been doing portraits from the mouth to the eye and you're always best to just kind of shrink that down a bit and then try to fit the nose up into that space but people have tricks all the time I know when I was in college the three-quarter thing if I could see where the noses and where the cheek goes that because it just kind of all of a sudden when I saw that and go all I can measure the side of the face by where the cheek is in relationship to the nose I was like perfect if all I needed because before that I always have these low fat faces so certain things will catch on and everybody will find something a little bit different I always find that it's interesting how somebody can take a box of noses and faces and eyes and stuff and actually get someone to look you know like forensics where they go in and do a portrait of somebody I always think that's just amazing how they can do that that requires some drawing skill so who is this person I don't recognize that who's that that's fifty years ago from a photograph work did you just transform yourself fentanyl it's amazing what you could do with makeup right it's beautiful it's not the homework assignment though they'd see here again - this is a white chick right she's white but if we look at her shadow tones she gets into some really dark colors it's very deceiving you got to kind of really trust yourself that you got to get those dark tones in there because without those dark tones you can't get a high light you can't get the bright and you can see how beautiful the light is sitting in here that comes from having shadows you didn't have two shadows and they would fall flat again the vaunted of portrait when she first started it was a little african-american kid wasn't he black kid a beautiful little dark kid baby little guy he was in a bubble bath and the you know bubbles everywhere so it was just all of a sudden you had all these bubbles in this little dark face sticking up out of the bubble and we've spent weeks arm wrestling and seriously I thought she was going to drop out because I could never get her to paint what she saw I mean when she ended up she ended up with a little black in snow you know it was it was a really odd thing and I was constantly always trying to get her to match her colors and she goes but it's but bubbles aren't that color and I go yeah they are in the shadow third art and so we always like battling it out so she has some scars that she's dealing with now and oftentimes these things come into your painting later on so she's fearful of doing that but the exercise is actually the paint from life and work on your memory exercises and actually to mess up yeah a lot of people didn't do the self purchase because they're fearful of messing up and the reason why they're fearful of messing up is because it's your face on it and you're exposing yourself as a mess up you know so is it's just a lot of tension in you that's why I think it's good for the beginning students just taken you know they're amongst all these be you know artists and to take the risks to come into a situation like this to do it is amazing but the exercise is to practice that memory exercise to work from life from a mirror and see what that's like not just to get a reverse image and painted like in the picture so your homework assignment this week because I know you could do it is to do it to do one so she took a picture of herself in order to cheat and then she flipped it so that maybe this reversed image and then hopefully we'd never really talked about how the homework assignment was and then you painted it do we let people have excuses she's only had a week and you did this very very nice did a good job yeah it's good but you know here again - not enough shadow often times you know I have these big brows and so I could sit and paint this little four-year-old girl you know and she'll have these big heavy brows on them you know I was like everything when I paint my portrait my brows become like the main focal point I mean this is because that's just kind of a characteristic so when you have a certain thing like if that bothers you or that's your characteristics of your nose and stuff that you kind of pay attention to at times and going wow that's a big note it starts to stand out in your portraits but then I told you you could blur all that down so you could do what Elizabeth Taylor doesn't just put it through a filter and just like yeah I towards the end Oliver I mean all of our movies look like they're all out of focus did I so anyway so as we said you only really need to have detail on the eyes the nose could go into into blurriness and same thing with the mouth okay simplify that get that up there get a little more shadow when you set up your self portions you want to have the light hitting you so that you can get shadow and shadows like really crucial and if you don't have that you look like you're taking a mug shot at the police department because it's just a flat light so it's all about lighting [Music] so whose is this things like the only guy in the room right has over - what were you thinking it's scooby's its Putin you know we just need a Donald Trump this is kind of good drawings well off here because this remember I told you that's the hardest thing for most people to get that needs to be shrunk down and then you need to figure out how to get that nose to poor shorten them so that's one of the issues here you got more light in here beautiful shadows beautiful color flesh tones it's like your first portrait ever you ever opinion another portrait never done a portrait report that's pretty damn good when you painting something like this it's really really hard because what happens is that you're looking in the mirror and then you look at your painting and then you come back and look at the mirror again and you're not turning your face that much and then come back and then you turn your face back you're looking at the other side of the face then you go back and paint and so what happens is that you start getting all of these different views of that how you turn your head to look at something so you go like this and you're kind of looking at and now you're painting too much over here because you actually do somewhat of a three-quarter on this side so you're like it's a difficult discipline so the stage gets a little drawn-out and so one of the thing that you have to learn if you're going to be doing self-portraits like this is as you gotta to situate your face in the same position that's one of the hardest things to do now what artists will actually do is that they'll actually mark the mirror so if you hit talked a little you could actually like put a line on the mirror so that you can line up your face again if you're you could put a line out here to know where your year is and so you can get back into the same place again it's really really difficult and so the thing that you are beating yourself up over is something that is true in painting all self-portraits so don't knock yourself out so little mean but the thing is that's what a self-portrait looks like it's not you if that's the nature of self for portraits they always look a little intent well you want to be there with a stupid smile I mean after a while that looks cheesy tear you know and the thing is what's really important and you were talking about doing mouth but don't smile don't show your teeth because that opens up a whole nother set of worms because here again - you want your mouth to be blended so you don't have the detail in there and if you start showing your teeth now you've got to deal with your teeth and oftentimes it looks like a mouthful of chicklets how do you get that so you've got to remember that the teeth colors do the same color as the flesh color the whites of the eyes is the same color as the flesh color with more white they appear white because they're the lightest thing in our face but they're not white at all they're actually flesh color teeth are actually flesh colour when you do teeth do as little as possible and blur them out because nobody wants to sit and stare at a mouth and the biggest problem people have with lips and teeth and noses is that they try to draw to detail them and [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Stefan Baumann

Views: 114,450

Rating: 4.8412018 out of 5

Keywords: How to paint Portraits, Painting Portraits, Self Portraits, Portrait painting, oil painting, artist, Alla Prima, drawing the portraits, self portrait, Stefan Baumann, The Grand View

Id: kTE-mycR6EY

Length: 34min 2sec (2042 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 25 2017