HOW TO SAVE AN OIL PAINTING YOU'VE OVERWORKED

today i want to talk about how to save a painting that has gone off the rails i would love to tell you that for this painting i started it and then intentionally took it to a kind of messy place and then expertly saved it for the purposes of this demonstration but the truth is is that for this painting i actually just kind of jumped in i was having a good time um and kind of just like letting myself play which is something i talk about a lot on this channel and i think one of the natural consequences of play is that sometimes you can push the painting a little bit too far you can start overworking things you might not be super mindful about laying down particularly efficient brush work and that's exactly what happened here i sort of lost my drawing um pretty early on and in an effort to correct that i didn't really have this super loose precise clean brush work that i want um things were getting a little bit muddy and in an effort to save it i had to get a little bit more blendy or rindery that is to say i was working into wet paint um and i was i was working pretty precisely i wasn't going in with sort of looser more evocative brush strokes because i had to find that drawing again and this i think is a natural thing that can happen when you're painting loosely no matter what mindset you go into the painting with it's just easy to lose the drawing if you are working not super tightly or you don't have a pencil drawing underpinning the painting that you can refer back to or even if you do once you cover it up you're kind of going by the seat of your pants a little bit and one other thing that i really want to emphasize here is that i was going into this with a very playful mindset you can absolutely go into a painting really trying to plan out every brushstroke and there is 100 of time and a place for that and i think that there's a time and place for that with anybody who wants to paint loosely and do it well that being said i think having that level of stakes not to mention that level of concentration going into a painting can set you up for perfectionism or fear of failure so i really like prioritizing play i really enjoy getting into this mindset and i prioritize doing it a good bit to give you a little bit of story time you know anytime i go into painting from life with east oak studio i tend to think of that as sort of the sweet spot like best of both worlds i know that i only have three hours i know everyone is watching i know that i'm sitting next to painters who are just excellent and as a result that really motivates me to think about every mark that i put down and that tends to go well it doesn't necessarily work out the way i hoped every single painting but the act of being with other people and in painting that also brings an element of play into it for me but when i'm in my own studio i struggle to get both of those things and i think that's just because i've been painting alone in my studio for long enough that it's sort of lost its cachet it's it's much more fun for me to paint with others um so when i'm by myself it tends to be one thing or the other and i wouldn't be surprised if that's the case for you too so either you go into the studio and you just let the chips fall how they may is that the expression i hope it is um or you go in and you have an intention for that painting session and you're going to really work hard to hold yourself to it and so the result of this painting is that where i get midway through the piece i think is actually really similar to a lot of paintings that students ask for me to critique or they ask for my help with which is great because i wind up saving this painting and the fact that i'm able to do that means that for most of you for most paintings that you're making if you get to a place where you're stuck those paintings can be saved and i think that's really what distinguishes the experienced you know master level artist and the artist who is working up to that point so in this video i want to talk through the things that i thought about to bring this painting back to get my drawing back to clean up some of the brush work that had built up you know the paint layer had gotten too thick how did i manage that and in the process how did i do things like correct color correct values and then the final piece is that what i started with in the background for this piece i didn't really like and i know why this happened and i'm going to talk about why that happened and i'm going to talk about how i fixed it so first things first on this painting my biggest problem from the very beginning was that i didn't have a super clear plan for this piece i did have a reference this is another portrait from one of howard lyon's reference packs and i knew how it would be cropped and thus how much of the painting it would actually take up but i didn't take the time to actually establish a plan for the background and that was because i really like that technique i like the technique of going and pre-planning as much of the painting as you possibly can that being said the way i do this is in photoshop which requires that i have a photo reference and i am painting from life often enough that i didn't want to be entirely reliant on a tool like photography or like photoshop i wanted to start playing with how i could intuitively develop an abstract brushy interesting background and a natural part of that process is sometimes you are going to take a risk and trust yourself and that's going to pay off and you're going to prove to yourself that you can actually intuitively arrive at the result that you're looking for in and be really pleasantly surprised other times as a natural part of the learning process you're it's just not gonna work um and that is to say that failure is a necessary part of this learning process um and that's not to say that the lesson here is that i shouldn't try it's just sometimes it's not going to pan out and so i need to go back to reliable tools that i know i can use for problem solving so interestingly midway through this painting i took a look at the backgrounds that i had roughed in and then i just grabbed some abstract brushwork from other paintings to test out some color combinations and some mark making combinations that i thought would accent this particular painting nicely and i probably would have set myself up for more success had i done this in the beginning but again i i wanted to actually test this um so i don't begrudge myself this mistake too much but i want to point it out to all of you because i have been going through this planning step for quite some time and it was time for me to push past that a little bit but for most painters i talk to they are simply not putting enough time or thought into getting a very clear concrete plan for their paintings so if i had done this from the very beginning i probably wouldn't have run into drawing problems which would have helped me avoid building up the paint layer too thickly and getting too many marks down that weren't actually correct so if i could give you one piece of advice it would be to make sure you've actually done this step and then at the point where things are really clicking and you're in a groove then i think it's appropriate to begin working a bit more intuitively now from here let's go ahead and talk about the drawing so one thing that i tell to my students all the time is to check your drawing early and often and if you do that you really shouldn't have to rework your painting once you have already put color down and this was a place where i'd say it's a combination of hubris and me trying to rely a little bit less on checking my drawing um so let me explain what that means so in a perfect world what i see over and over what i've learned from all of my students and what i've learned from myself my own growth and my own process is that we run into a ton of trouble if we start getting into color and brush work and value before the drawing is actually correct and the reason this leads to trouble is let's imagine that i'm painting this portrait and the eye is in the wrong place that's not actually hard to imagine because that is a problem i had in this painting but what would happen if i built up that eye to absolute perfection and then realized it was in the wrong place do i move the entire face to fit with the location of this perfect eye or do i make myself paint the whole thing over again that is not a position that any painter wants to be in and really experienced painters if if they do run into this problem typically have the experience that after a minute of cursing whatever art gods are out there they suck it up and then they just correct it and it winds up being fine but for a lot of us that can be a really disruptive thing to our paintings so the best move we can make is to go ahead in the very beginning and make sure that our drawing is really strong i have a whole video on how i check my drawings or at least one way that i check my drawings that i will link up above this is a super duper helpful tool if you are working from a photograph there are also a lot of ways that you can check your drawing if you're working from life but i'll talk about that in another video so for this one i used the method of taking a photo of my painting and lining it up in photoshop to check the drawing way too late i had already started to get in color um and i just had made a lot of erroneous decisions about what was happening with the drawing and i plowed on anyway and the result is that i lost a lot of the expressive improvisational quality to the brush work because i had to go back and rework so much of the drawing if i had been a little bit more methodical and if i had checked my drawing before i started to get into detail let alone color that would have actually helped me stay a lot looser because i wouldn't have had to erase or cover up work that wasn't correct to begin with so even if taking the time to check your drawing feels really tedious or time consuming or not necessarily an intuitive step in the painting process do it anyway this is a hill that i will absolutely die on if you are looking to capture an accurate likeness it's really important that you just take the time to go through this step because in the end it's actually going to save you way more time than it costs you and it actually is a really essential ingredient in working loosely one other thing i want to say quickly on the topic of drawing is that i know a lot of painters who use techniques like projecting or tracing um to start their piece and typically these are the painters who feel most comfortable starting with a pencil drawing but that's not exclusively true i think there's a time and a place for this like if you are doing a color study or you are working on something that is simply not the drawing but you're actively trying to build a different skill i think just getting the drawing in there can be a really helpful starting point so you can focus on what matters that being said i think there's something that happens when you know that you're reliant on tracing or projecting where you get really afraid of losing that drawing and that's because you didn't put that drawing in there to begin with you relied on a tool to get the drawing in there um and i think the result of that is actually a little bit counter to the example i'm discussing here i think the result of using tracing or projecting is that you can wind up tightening up much more than you want and the reason is this if you were able to successfully get an accurate drawing on your own you've done it once so you can do it again and in doing that if you start to paint really loosely and you accidentally lose a little bit of the drawing one you've already put the drawing in so chances are you know what correction has to be made but you also have the confidence of knowing that you've already done it so again you can do it a second time when you're reliant on tracing or projecting however you're lacking a little bit of that confidence and i do actually think that makes a big difference and the result is that sometimes you will tighten up to the point where you're just really afraid of losing that drawing so i could probably make a whole video on just this topic alone but it really bears mentioning that this topic of drawing actually relates to the looseness in your painting quite strongly and the method that you use makes a really big difference okay so from here let's go ahead and talk about how i solved problems on the canvas itself so things like controlling the paint and avoiding muddiness or fixing muddiness the first thing i'm going to say is that there is not a magic bullet for this but that's actually good news there's no secret tip or technique that you have to spend time mastering in order to do this for yourself the biggest thing that i found that has really made a difference in controlling the paint is looking for the moment where i can tell the paint isn't doing what i wanted it to do and stopping so that i could adjust coarse so throughout this painting there are a lot of places where i realized i put down the wrong value or the paint that i put down is blending together or things are starting to look muddy or chalky because i'm putting wet paint down on top of wet paint now when you're more proactive about your planning and making sure your drawing is good you run into these issues a lot less but if you're already in this position obviously we need to know how to get you out without making a mess of the painting so as you watch me going through and cleaning up this piece i want you to pay specific attention to a place where i start a brush stroke and then i wind up going right back over that stroke immediately and typically the stroke that i lay down is either a little bit larger or a little bit more precise these are places where i realized that i was in trouble that the initial mark that i was putting down was either not blending correctly or i had the wrong value or the shape of the brushstroke wasn't working the way that i hoped that it would and i know this sounds really simple but i think one thing that happens as you go down the path to mastering your craft is that you start to be able to juggle a little bit more in your mind you are better able to identify the moment where something is about to go wrong and go ahead and put in the time and the effort to actually correct it it's not that the act of correcting it is necessarily magical it's just that when you're earlier in your journey that's a lot for you to juggle it's a lot to juggle all the decisions that made into putting down the initial brush stroke for you to then say oh gosh i need to do it again and i need to fix a particular problem with it then the second thing that i will say is that knowing your brushes and how to use them does make a difference here but i would say that it's secondary so i have a video all about brush control and how to effectively layer wet paint on top of wet paints that i will link above as well as in the description for you to check out that's going to give you a lot of insight into exactly how i'm manipulating my tools to get the control that i'm looking for that being said i don't think that is nearly as important as being able to catch yourself when you're doing something that isn't what you had hoped it would be now in case you're curious for this painting i am primarily using rosemary ivory filberts there's nothing magical about this particular brush it's just the texture and consistency and feel that i've been favoring lately in my work and it also works really well for this more like dry painting technique that i'm using i also have several creative mark qualita synthetic flats these are the orange brushes that i'm using throughout the video i don't think there's anything magical about these either but they do give me a very predictable mark and i would say the same is true for the ivories but the creative mark brushes are just a little bit smoother and their bristles are a little bit softer and thinner so it's easy for me to get like very very uniform honestly like synthetic looking brush marks um so that does make a little bit of a difference but i probably could have made a painting very similar to this one with very different brushes so i did want to point that out and kind of just share that with you to demystify some of the stuff that can come up around brushes but the important thing is using enough paint using enough medium when necessary and laying your paint down with the brush on its side if you want your marks not to blend into one another and that's exactly what i go over in the video that i mentioned all right and those were exactly the things that helped me to save this painting and if you want help on that path if you want support on being able to do that more quickly more easily and more effectively those are exactly the kind of painters that i really enjoy working with and that i know exactly how to help there's a link down in the description to check out my free masterclass if you want to learn more about what i do with that i will see you all in the next one happy painting

Channel: Chelsea Lang

Views: 20,483

Keywords: oil painting, time lapse, art, painting tutorial, art tutorial, art time lapse, alla prima, chelsea lang, painting, oil painting techniques, chelsea lang painter, alla prima oil painting, chelsea lang artist, canvas painting, paintings, painting ideas, painting for beginners, how to paint, paint with me, oil painting portrait, painting videos, oil painting tutorial, art painting, portrait painting, how to oil paint, painting time lapse, oil painting time lapse

Id: bpIIg4WDx4E

Length: 20min 17sec (1217 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 13 2022