I Paint Three Peaches - Painting Demo

[Music] when I originally painted these peaches I and here's the finished painting here I what I tried to do was paint something with a certain surface texture and in this case being the peach fuzz which is soft and has a certain quality to it and demonstrate that even though if you look at the peaches up close in detail you see the peach fuzz and it looks soft and everything else that actually when you paint as long as you put a texture in your painting it really doesn't matter what that texture is so long as your values and your colors are right and I've got some other videos where I demonstrate this and I could show you examples but for instance if you can even see polished marble and a brand an artist might paint it with the real choppy brushwork looks nothing like polished marble but as long as he has his values right and his colors right when you step back across the room it looks like polished marble it's it's almost a magical thing about painting so in this painting here what I'm doing is I'm just laying in my values I'm not thinking at all about you know soft peach fuzz and at no point will I attempt to try to paint that peach fuzz in detail and I know there's artists out there you know that paint ultra realism and you know photo realism you know it's in the extreme and there's nothing wrong with that if that's the type of painting that you like but in the painting that I'm that I demonstrate and and sort of try to do myself is is where you just lay in your color so you lay in your values you leave in a certain amount of brushwork and you leave a certain a certain amount of surface texture which is the brushwork and you don't blend it all all up and make it a big smooth you know whatever it is if you as soon as you start blending everything together you lose the surface texture you lose the brushwork and it becomes a soft blurry whatever that your brain doesn't isn't able to fix a and isn't able to see the surface of so you've got to have a little bit of you know edginess a little bit of delicate brushwork or whatever that you can stare into it and see some texture and you can already see that in the bottom of this peach that I'm painting and in this case I am NOT doing this as strictly according to the method that I teach my method for teaching is a very strict and I'm allowing myself some liberties here I am NOT I didn't premix my colors for instance I'm just mixing them as I as I need them and just kind of playing around on my palette and I would encourage any of my students who've been using my method for you know 20 paintings or whatever to to try to paint this way the the method that I teach for beginners is a method where you mix your rows of color ahead of time and you really focus in on understanding how to mix your colors accurately and everything else but once you've been painting for a while I think there's nothing in the world wrong with just going out there and just mixing your colors on the fly and doing whatever because now that I've been doing this a long time and this goes for anybody that's you know been doing my method for a long time and I painted you know portraits for years and only in the very beginning that I really strictly adhere to color mixing ahead of time and everything else later on as I as I started painting portraits I began to play with my colors more and more and even if I did premix some colors which I often did mix premix a certain number of them I would definitely play with them kind of discover as I painted that I needed colors that I didn't mix or whatever and I still encourage people to do that to to you know mix your colors even if you mix perfect rows of color when you start to paint you're always going to find variation in little differences and in the case of these peaches there's crazy variation there's purple there's red orange yellow blue I mean there's really almost everything in there maybe not pure blue but there's definitely some Gray's as the peach fuzz and goes around the edge so this was an especially if I were to mix these color groups you know there would be three or four in these peaches just because they're just such different colors and that goes for apples and a lot of other fruit too that can be you know you can even find an orange that on one side is completely green and the other side is completely orange so there's multiple color groups and a lot of fruit but peaches are especially wide ranging in their color so now I'm just putting in some background and another thing that I did that was unorthodox or I should say not strictly according to the method that I teach for for beginning artists is that I normally insist that my students put in some background around whatever they're painting and so I started to paint that peach without any background around it and that would be something I would encourage my students to not do and that's because you can really judge the value so much better when you have some color around whatever it is and you can also push it around easier you know if you make a mistake and your peach gets a little fat you can bump it on the left and the right and make it thinner so this is very much me just kind of doing my thing I painted these peaches without any thought to trying to demonstrate my method I've got plenty of other videos that do that but really the main emphasis again is that I wanted to show that if you leave some brush work in you never have to get around to painting the surface of anything just leave in a little bit of texture and you can forget about painting the peach fuzz or the you know strawberry seeds or whatever it is and there are a lot of great examples that I've given in other videos where you can look at great art you know the strawberries for instance and then look at how they're painted and there was nobody ever or the artist didn't paint the surface itself they didn't paint the little seeds and the little hairs that are in strawberry's skin or any of that they just painted an abstract texture with good values and good color and then your brain fills it in so and that's really important to understand because it all goes back to this thing I've also talked about in other videos about painting ugly and that is that when you're up close staring at a painting and there's a lot of brushwork you're not going to see the peach fuzz you're not and so you know you tend to especially if you're the artist who's working on it and who's painting it you know it's part of that artists curse when you're staring at your painting up close you see you know the ugly surface or the ugly brushwork and what you don't realize that is that if you step back you know 10 feet it all turns into you know a beautiful still life but you can't see it when you're up close so you tend to overwork things and you know over blend and over fix and in the process you milk all your values up and your colors up which are far more important than trying to paint a bunch of super detail so I hope this painting will demonstrate that one of the things and I've talked about this also in other videos in terms of color theory and everything but if you ever have a milky color and if you look at the bottom of this peach for instance it is not milky and I would say that a lot of people would end up with a milky color so whenever you have milk is sort of a gray and so you could almost think of milk as being your colors being too blue because Gray's are basically blues dirty blues so the bottom of that peach really has almost no milk in it and where it does it's it's on the edge where you start to pick up the grace but that deep orange there in the middle on the bottom is a color that you know once it gets a little bit of white in it you can't make it it's just burnt umber red yellow and those are colors if you look at your color wheel that are on the orange side and so the opposite of milk is orange the color orange and if you look at burnt umber on the color wheel it's right on the orange side of the color wheel so if you ever have a dark shadow that looks milky you know you could add orange to it but orange is gonna bring the value up if you've got a lot of cadmium yellow in it or whatever so if you have a dark color and it looks milky milky shadows or whatever throw some burnt umber into it while it's still wet and that burn number will will get rid of the milk sober numbers are good you know anytime you see a milky color it just means that it's a it's too blue to gray which is the same as to blue just throw a little burnt umber into it and the milk will disappear and if it's in the mid range or upper upper value color some of the lighter colors then you can just use orange to get rid of milk but milk tends to appear in people shadows and that's because white it is you know it just gets into everything so your highlights have got white in it and all it takes is just a dirty brush you know dragged through a shadow area and it'll just turn to milk in a second it doesn't take any almost any white at all that to get in there and milk it out so when I whenever I paint free like this and I just kind of mix my colors as I need them I'm thinking about all of those things and if I see an area that's looking too gray then I'm just gonna throw orange into it but these peaches that tell you what they were there were a lot of colors I found myself spending a lot of time on my palate and you know I've one of the things that I try to make a strong point to my students is is that and I don't show this in my videos because if I showed you how much time on my palate I spend I don't think I'd get as many views because it would be a pretty boring video to a lot of people I try to give you a good flavor of my time on the palate but there's a lot of palate time that I don't show you and I would say that I spend more time on my palate than I do on my canvas and and I'd say that without any doubt and that was something I heard and I've mentioned this in a video but there was a story about Sargent and how he was painting a portrait of this girls I think it was her sister or maybe it was her and or somebody a family member that was having their portrait done by Sargent and they were observing the whole thing and they and they wrote a letter to another relative and mentioned that then it was very unexpected to see sergeant spending so much time mixing his colors that he would you know hold out a brush and run back and forth to the to the subject and spent a lot of time on his palate mixing colors and that's if you think about it it makes sense because you know really you know you can just get up there and push the colors that are already on your canvas around and paint with a dirty brush and but if you really want to have if you really want to be deliberate with your colors and and and with the and to get all the nuance you've got to go and spend some time on your palette and you know when I do portraits especially I mean I I might mix some colors to start with but by the time I'm done I've completely run out of space and I've adjusted and mixed all kinds of variation and that's true for you know skin tends to be that way it has all kinds of different shades in it you know something like a peach in a way you know noses a red cheeks are red foreheads are less red chins and necks are less red and so you get that variation so now I'm mixing up a new color which I believe is going to be you know to get this a little bit of background put in around this peach that I'm about to start on and I did do some color checking in this video I did not record any of that because I didn't have a third camera set up but I did do some color checking and I always recommend to my students who are starting out that they what I say is check every stroke and that may seem tedious and very slow when you're starting out but it's a great way to develop good habits and then as you paint more and more you'll speed up and you won't need to check every stroke so I checked a little bit too generally I like to get my bearings and then once I get started I can kind of be more you know just just going by instinct but if you're starting out I absolutely recommend checking every stroke before you paint it and that's how you learn to see value and to see color I think I've painted this silver dish and two or three different demos I guess I like it and I painted this painting of many months ago I used it for another demo talking about surface texture but I just wanted you guys to be able to see the whole thing and I'm not showing you every every stroke for sure this is very much condensed but I try to show you the enough of it so you can kind of see exactly how I painted it so now I've decided to paint the rest of the silver lid here just because it surrounds the peaches and really should have painted some fabric in around the silver in the first place it's just really just taking me taking shortcuts but always better to have some background around an object before you paint it so one of the things that I do when I'm painting and I'm laying in my color is on the first layer so to speak and sometimes there's only and when I mean layer I mean the first when you when you first try to cover the canvas with paint I try not to think too much about does this look like a peach I'm really only making value decisions I'm asking is the value that I'm putting in the correct value I'm not asking myself is this looking like peach or the skin of a peach the whole point is is that if you get your values right and you don't over blend and you leave a little bit of texture in there it's gonna look like a peach and so when you're once you do get the canvas covered and you're trying to decide whether something looks right or not even at that point I always just look into my values and I make value corrections or shape Corrections but what I don't do is look at detail and start staring into you know the the fuzz on the on the peach or whether it's a you know a texture and a fabric or whatever it is and try to make it look one look like the other you'll go crazy the only way to to paint that way is to take it you know all the way to the extreme and get into almost photo realism we're extremely tight painting where you're almost have to get out a needle brush so it's better just to lay it down leave it alone and always focus on the values when you step back away from your painting and you're ten feet away the only thing that matters to the viewer are value mistakes so when you step back and you're you know six or ten feet away from your painting even then you shouldn't look into it and say does that look like fabric because of the artists curse and because of the fact that you've painted it as you lay in your color you lose your objectivity you have a hard time seeing it and but if you'll just focus on the value problems in other words you look into a shadow and you say my shadow is too light my shadows too dark or whatever it is then you know the the object will begin to look realistic and it will begin to look like whatever it is you're painting all by itself just by just by solving the value problems and it's you know it's something that I learned to do naturally over years of painting portraits but it's something that only I guess in the last couple years have I been able to sort of express it in words and it's simply that let me repeat it because it's it's worth repeating in fact I should make a whole video on this and that is that when I am trying to decide as I am here as I'm painting in these shadow colors I am not thinking this this look like a peach I'm not thinking does this look like the skin of the peach or do i mi see do I see the the fuzz on the surface or whatever it is and this goes for fabric or for anything else I'm simply looking in to my painting and I'm making value decisions and that's a that can be if you're starting out that's a lot of color checking so the question I have is I put this little mark here on this peaches is the value correct and that's something I can check by color checking if I don't have an instinct for it but solving those value problems well that's the whole ballgame because once you get the canvas covered if all your values are right it'll look like a peach one of the reasons I show my completed paintings at the beginnings at the beginning of my video of all my videos whenever I do a video where I do a demonstration of me painting a painting and you know showing it through completion I always show the painting finish at the beginning and that's because if I were to just let you let the viewer watch me paint it and watch it develop the whole time they would in a sense get a little bit of the artist curse like I I have as I painted it and what I mean is imagine you know when I finish it as this painting you've already seen this painting if you watch the beginning of this video I showed you the peaches and if you like my style of painting you might have said well that's a that's a really nice painting of some peaches but if you watch me paint the whole thing and then at the end I declare it finished you're very likely to say oh he forgot why didn't he ever fix that that corner there where the brushwork is or why didn't he ever put the peach fuzz in like I expected him to do or why didn't he ever fix that you know ugly shadow that's all rough and so that's that's the critical mind that makes those sorts of judgments the way you get away from that critical mind is you simply fix your value problems or put in your values the way they were and you simply do not worry about the surface and do not make it look pretty because to the viewer from a distance who walks in and didn't see you paint it and watch the whole thing they know that the painting will look great to them so as part of the way that I teach I say that I have three or really actually four workflows or you could even say four different flow charts for how you do all the different parts of finishing and oil painting and the first one is laying in your pencil lines which I did not film in this video the second one is preparing your palette which does not mean that you're mixing all of your colors it just means that your pre mixing the key colors and in whatever you're painting in this case peaches and that's a second workflow or flow chart that you would follow and then the third a workflow that you would follow is covering the canvas which is what I'm doing here and when you're covering the canvas and you're checking your colors and you're you know if you're just starting I encourage my students to check every single stroke and that means if you're using a color checker you're holding out your color checker and you're investigating and seeing what the color looks like and if you're working from a laminated photo you can just wipe the paint right on the photo but anyway that's that's the third workflow covering the canvas which is what I'm doing now and one of the things that I you know reiterate with my students and I emphasize over and over is that when they're doing that that workflow as I'm doing me.how covering the canvas you're really not supposed to judge your work and decide whether it's looking pretty or whether you're the shadows too dark or whether you think the colors are looking right you just sort of blindly follow your color checking and lay it in but then the fourth workflow which is the workflow of once the canvas is covered which I haven't gotten to yet in this painting once you're at that point and the entire canvas is covered and you've maybe you know maybe you painted it sloppy maybe you've got you know a lot of brushwork in there that that doesn't look like it belongs or whatever it is but you once the canvas is covered you completely change gears and you move into the new workflow which is what's the difference is what I call it but it's where you look at your source whether it's a photo or whether you're working from life and you ask what is the difference between my painting and the source and here's the key about that is that if I bring in somebody off of the streets and they look at my finished painting when I've just completed the covered the canvas but I haven't really tried to work it or anything else they can make judgments about that just as well as as anybody in other words if I come in and I ask somebody right now what do you think about the color of this peach and because the canvas isn't covered they will very likely misjudge it and say well it looks like it's this or that especially when you're just first starting to put in the shadows if I bring somebody in who doesn't know how to paint they will tell me that the shadow you know looks too dark when it's really not too dark that's if the canvas is not covered but once the canvas is covered they can look at your source and they can look at your painting and you can do this yourself and you can decide that you can clearly see whether the shadow is too dark in your painting or whether it's too light or whatever it is in other words you can make judge value judgments very well with your eye you don't even have to have a trained eye once the canvas is covered but before the canvas is covered you will make the wrong judgment one after another and if you go back in in this video that your what that I'm these peaches and you look at the peach when it especially when the shadows are just being put in you might think well the shadow looks too dark or that doesn't look right or whatever else but once the canvas is covered then I can ask you does the shadow look too dark and if and you'll be able to see it just as well as I can so that is all to say that covering the canvas and blindly following your color checking and not making value judgments as you go along not fixing as you go along not overworking your canvas but simply putting in your spots of paint just like I've done here on this peach and that's gonna get you and then at that point you can go into that first work fourth workflow which is you know what's the difference and that's when you can have the judgment to see that so here I am I'm just filling in the silver which you know again I should have done that in the beginning I don't know why I did not paint background in you know when I set off when I decided to paint these peaches I decided beforehand that I would paint it sort of my own way I decided I'd paint some you know pretty realistic peaches but that I was just going to do it using my own free workflow where I don't follow my method if you want to follow my method and you want to learn how to paint I would strongly encourage you to go watch one of my three videos I've got three videos on my drawings paint site and their YouTube videos you can go search for them in my in my video list but how to paint in oil how to draw in proportion and how to mix colors in those three videos are the core workflows that I've been talking about and you know there's no secret to it it's just it's pretty simple I'm gonna make a video here soon I hope where I just go through each one of those workflows sort of quickly yeah you know bullet point by bullet point and just kind of go through it quickly and then I just so you can see sort of an overview of my whole method and I think that'll be helpful so this video is about 35 minutes long the painting part of it and but I think it took me when just the cameras rolling I think it was about almost eight hours to paint these peaches which was way longer than I really originally thought I thought I was just going to knock him out and not get too tight with it but I ended up deciding I wanted to really push it and anyway so I just worked on him more than I thought I thought I would and I ended up spending about eight hours on this painting which then I cut down to 35 minutes so the the part she don't see is me wiping my brush off me changing my brushes you know any color checking that I that I do I did not include and but what I try to do is instead of just running the Cameron super fast speed where it's it's I think it's up better if you if I run it I had normal speed but then kind of show you skip the parts you know that you can kind of figure out what I'm doing like here you can see I'm kind of filling in the table this is this is where I can really that the table for instance you know I was a lot more just kind of doing whatever I wanted to do and it wasn't trying to copy the table verbatim or anything and same thing with the cloth so it really didn't take me any time to paint the table I mean I probably took me in real time maybe you know 10-15 minutes I don't know maybe maybe longer I don't remember exactly but here you know it's in the peaches I was really trying to be much more careful about getting my values and colors right I think part of it was just the pressure knowing I was being filmed and that everybody was gonna be judging my colors and and all the rest whenever I paint without cameras rolling I find it a little more enjoyable in terms of you know not having to even think about what I'm doing whereas when the cameras are rolling I'm always thinking that you know you guys are judging my my work as I go along which is ridiculous but so silver and reflections you know a lot of times people think they're difficult but that's a an example of a if you just get your values right and your colors right you could just splotch in the paint any old way you want and doesn't matter how you do it or even with the texture of the surface looks like but if you get your values right and it's going to look like the metals it's going to look like silver and that reflection there is not quite as strong in my painting as it is in the source that red peach reflection there on the left but that's because in I've decided not to paint that peach and so it really doesn't even make sense why it's even there in the first place but I just decided to leave a little bit of that red in there so when you paint reflections you know I very much hold off on the very brightest part of the shine as you can see that's the very last thing that I'm putting in is that white bit I've already taken the time to build the foundation and like I'm here I'm building the foundation for the bright shine I'm sort of painting it with a lower value color with not a super bright color first and then I go back into it and put in the brighter bits and I guess I skipped that in the in the filming here I cut that part out but I just basically will put the very lightest bits of any reflection into a base of other you know you never want to just take the reflection and lay it right on top of something dark although I guess there are times when that that is probably how reflection is but it's extremely rare in fact I can't think of any time that I've ever seen a white reflection laid on top of a black or very dark background there's always a little bit of something going on underneath the reflection so this last peach which is only a half peach I didn't take nearly as much time of course to put in so in this in this peach painting you know I just laid it in and basically when I had finished covering the canvas I don't think I made any changes whatsoever I just decided to leave it exactly as it was I might have gone in and touched it here there but I don't remember I don't think I did I think I just you know finished up the silver I've forgotten to put the reflections on the lid there so I just went back in and put that in and then after I did that I just left the peaches the way they were even the little spot on the top there and that was again going back to just making a good value judgment in deciding that they were gonna be okay alright well thank you so much for watching and we'll see you guys next time you

Channel: Draw Mix Paint

Views: 489,046

Rating: 4.9391809 out of 5

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, alla prima, paint, painting, paintings, painting demo, mix paint, mix color, mixing color, mixing paint, color theory, color paint, color painting, oil paint

Id: r-kxPLRaz_0

Length: 36min 29sec (2189 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 29 2018