I Dressed Up as a 16th Century DUTCH BOY and PAINTED MYSELF!!

so this is probably one of the biggest video and painting projects i've ever produced one giant venture unifying photography videography and painting my three favorite things i'm very excited to share this project with you but we have to start from the beginning so buckle up [Music] if you know me or have been following the channel for a while you know i love to do self portraits i got a lot of love for painting myself i also have a lot of love for traditional oil painting and kind of following the masters looking back into the past at the epic paintings that were made anyways back in march i had this wacky idea to do this bigger self-portrait project where i kind of replicated an old master portrait style but more specifically it was like a 16th century dutch european style you know the ruffle collar the dark hat dark coat the three-quarter lighting in the dark background just the kind of quintessential you know european portrait of a male so once i wrap my head around that and i have the tunnel vision to execute this project i go very overkill and my desire to kind of replicate this painting turns into this yearning to get a really amazing reference photo and this is really where the journey begins i invited my good buddy sam over to the studio one night to help me take this photo this sacred photo that i had locked envisioned in my brain sam's an awesome photographer he does a lot of film photography anyways he brought all of his gear over um we had film cameras we had digital cameras we had a couple video cameras it was just an array of camera nerd gluttony and orgasms you know it's so selfish to say but you know for this whole project it was just something i love to do and this is like why i have the studio to do these creative projects so he came over with all his gear we started setting up we kind of organized the photo part of my studio and i had some good ideas of how to do it but you know i really needed sam's help two hands is better than one an important thing in this whole project of the painting was to nail all of the the outfit to production so i ordered all this stuff i got this handmade um felt hat from germany it was like 100 bucks i wanted it to be all historically accurate and just nailed the the costume design and after kind of the costume design the most important thing is the lighting and replicating these old portraits so we had a bunch of reference of all these old paintings and we were looking at them to really nail not only the composition of the photo and how i would be posed but more importantly the lighting and we kind of went with this like rembrandt triangle face um or lighting scheme which is very very iconic and very um well-known but uh you know that white backdrop was really not working for us so sam had the great idea of changing it out for this kind of darker red velvety textured backdrop we noticed in a lot of the the reference that we were referring to is that the background was very dark and we wanted to nail that as well so it was a great decision and we're just taking more photos goofing about you know i got this king arthur outfit just to test some more photos any excuse to dress up come on and so we just continued tweaking the process and testing photos moving things here and there changing out lenses the focal length we lowered the leds to a more golden tungsten color which worked great and it's just an iterative process of continuing to tweak you can see here sam is actually putting foam in my ruffle collar to make it extra poofy we're messing around a little with more film shots of my my plaque my youtube plaque but we finally finally kind of dialed everything in the composition the intensity of the light the bounce light my pose the backdrop the lens and we finally came to this really epic um composition and took an amazing photo that really is better than i could have ever imagined going into that night i knew in that night that we were gonna probably execute a great photo and i was confident but the photo that sam took that we made together was better than i really could have imagined that photo shoot was way back in march over seven months ago i cannot believe it um covid happened you know it pushed a lot of my projects back in the studio i also broke my leg really badly over the summer so there were just worldly elements continually pushing things back but my desire to really execute an amazing portrait kind of forces me to develop a really great strategy and what i mean by that is provide myself with as much information um and and preparation work preceding the painting so i really wanted to do a couple of studies i have this graphite pencil and i'm doing this small yet pretty developed um drawing of the portrait and the most important thing that i'm focusing with this pencil sketch is the value that's the most important thing the structural value within this painting obviously i want to nail the proportions and make it look like me but the dark coat the dark background the the elements and then having the really illuminated face and ruffle color like all of these things are really important and very nuanced once we get to the painting stage so i just wanted to lay that out and kind of get mediumly familiar and then i also did this extremely quick small painting study which was just kind of messing around with some colors looking at what palette i wanted to use and it was very basic but these two um these two studies are really important for the success of the big painting and and i'm really happy that i did these because it just gives me a little more insight moving forward with the big shebang and then moving on to surface prep what i'm actually going to be painting on i've had this beautiful 18 by 24 inch belgian linen canvas in my studio for the past two years a wonderfully nice older woman gave it to me a while ago and i've never used it it had that old portrait on it but i'm just using some old oil painting gunk to kind of prime it to ground it in more oil and you know you saw the two studies i have the capabilities of sketching this portrait out just by hand but i really want to ensure the best possible scenario yield the most success with the alignment the proportions and so i'm going to be using a grid so i made the background a little brighter so i can pencil in a grid and if you don't know what a grid is it's kind of just a bunch of lines um and you the the format of the lines are the same on a smaller picture and then you just copy that format on a larger surface aka this canvas i think i'm doing one a one-inch grid which is kind of a lot but it's a pretty um intricate portrait and so again i just i'm doing this grid to ensure the success of my proportions and everything in order to yield the most success [Music] we are rocking the zorn palette yet again i've been using this palette pretty much exclusively for the past six months i do a lot of portrait painting and this is a fabulous well-known portrait painting palette you wouldn't want to do a landscape or maybe some textured skill life still life with this but it's quite versatile only using titanium white yellow ochre cadmium red light and ivory black you know the limited amount of colors helps me not get confused with say eight to ten colors and the variables are less so you can mix colors you know every combination of colors the maximum amount is going to be four different variables you know four different colors so um it limits you in that way and yields a better color harmony for me and my brain i feel like i'm just only two percent more familiar than i was in the beginning you know there it's so nuanced color and mixing color is one of the most amazing things about oil painting is why i'm in love with it the amount of nuance you could get even with four colors the amount of different colors you can mix the temperature shifts it's quite amazing and um even though it is limited it doesn't mean it's not powerful it's versatile it's powerful and it's amazing so we're just filling in the light now just chalking in a couple different values for the face my main objective i've said this before for these kind of longer oil paintings is to get a good first layer down fill the whole canvas with a layer of oil paint obviously focusing on value focusing on color making it look like me um but the first layer within that agenda is gonna be broken into zones so i'm working just in the skin tones right now that's one zone the face and the hands have the skin colors then we're going to move on to the hat but before that oh yeah i have this paint in my freezer if i'm going to step away from the painting for a day or something instead of letting the paint dry out on my palette or having to throw it away i just pop it in the freezer for a little i think it's just because there's not a lot of air in the freezer and air oxidizes the paint which makes it dry and so i'm able to save some paint i'm an alchemist but that's what i do for a few days if i'm away from the palette so this uh this is the other zone i just worked on the hat we're just breaking down this complex portrait into more manageable slices this beautiful little um red accent red felt within the under under the hat it's beautiful the next zone we're working on is the jacket obviously it's more of this chocolatey brown instead of a more gray cooler hat which the hat is i fixed later i said i had some issues with that but you could see the three color zones and the values on the palette that i pre-mixed um with a lot of black some red and some titanium white every combination with this palette has a little of everything and that's why it's so awesome and it's easier to find colors after stepping away the background dark and uh we're pretty much done with the first layer filling the whole canvas with some oil paint [Music] first layer's down we're gonna do an update the first painting layer my first agenda kind of with big oil painting projects is get the entire canvas filled with oil paint i had my different zones then i kind of delineated the jacket we got the skin tones we got the ruffle collar in the background so i attacked those certain zones as they came up it took longer than i honestly thought but i'm very happy and there's a few things i just wanted to talk about real quick while we're in this update you could see this hat i'm using the zorn palette which is there's no blue i did use a little ultramarine for the the pants we're gonna change that but in the hat i didn't use any blue at all all i used was ivory black and titanium white and it's such a cool black that it makes this blue especially when you compare it to these warmer tones in the jacket and the face in the background this gray with just black and white looks very blue it's insane it's very cool but it's too blue and it's also too light i gotta bring a lot more darkness into the hat it's kind of sticking out looking funny i have loads of work to do on the ruffle collar also the hands are not in great shape the face i'm very excited for it's it's good the framework is there and just general next layer source strategy is coming into play now i'm very happy with the jacket i think that's like the most successful part so far i spent the most time on this part i'm really happy we're moving forward on to the next layer so after the paint dries for a while it fades and when you reattach a painting after it's been drying you want to oil out and what oil out means is kind of making the surface more receptive for oil paint you bring back the actual color i'm using liquin original here which is a quick drying medium it changes the viscosity of oil paint but you could also use it to oil out so i'm just rubbing a very thin layer over the face because i'm going to reattach the face right now and you can see it brings back the color the deepness the blacks and it's important because that's what the colors actually will be so when mixing new colors you know what the colors underneath are i just did it on the background there so you can see how dark the background actually is and it fades and gets lighter when it dries so you want to reapply some oil to see what you're working with and uh we're just you know we're just going second layer this shot was slightly overexposed as i'm looking back but um yeah we did some great work in the first layer to establish the value structure in the face and and same with everything it's kind of like the the first layer i said and the next part is really just dialing things in bringing darks and lights here i'm actually changing the background originally the picture sam and i took had this wonderful reddish velvet thing but i didn't like the warm background i wanted to play with the complementary colors of red in the face and the pink in the face and have a green background i'm really happy with that decision actually it was something i was nervous about i always get nervous for the background but i'm happy i did this trying to flesh out that ruffle collar gave me some trouble the hands oh man hands are so difficult i painted live on patreon i was working on these hands and i was talking about how much trouble they gave me they're quite complex they're not the focal point but you want the hands to be at the same standard as the face just like every other inch of the painting surface and yeah just an absolute blast this painting you know it really pushed me to try some new techniques i did some glazing in here which i didn't really catch on film unfortunately but just you know holding myself to a standard and really trying to take my time that's like my biggest issue is rushing and and not being patient and not mixing colors correctly or efficiently mixing paint and you know holding every single brush stroke to the highest standard i can so um that's what i'll leave you with really happy with how this turned out [Music] so [Music] it's amazing it's been over seven months from the inception of this project all the way to completion you know way back in march when i had this small idea i never thought that my pursuit and my enthusiasm for the pursuit of the process would scale up the project to what it was with the huge photo shoot sam helping me out to really spending a lot of time on an oil painting making a huge video documenting the whole process which i kind of do anyways i love to share hopefully you enjoyed this whole project you know this is why i have this studio i built this studio to be used as the resource to kind of accomplish creative projects like this have it to be a utility um and you know because of kovid there hasn't been a lot of people but it's been great having sam in here and just this is what i want to do you know this is like the dream project obviously the red tape of the work i do now video editing and different commissions there's other projects but this is like the project that i dream about and again i thought about it so much in the beginning another portrait of myself to be in the studio um let me know what you think i had a blast stay tuned we got more projects like this on the channel coming very soon i'm excited for the coming months see in the next video

Channel: SLEW

Views: 201,904

Rating: 4.9696798 out of 5

Keywords: create, slew, art, vlog, vlogger, spray, paint, how, to, mural, graffiti, street, tutorial

Id: NvVs77ry01A

Length: 15min 58sec (958 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 24 2020