Hi, Ian Roberts and Mastering Composition and
welcome, this week, to my studio! You know, I originally started with the idea of looking at
brushes and paint, of course, and then that led to the idea of well, I should mention the pencils I
use, and how I sharpen them, and then of course the paper, and well you need to understand the lighting,
at least the way you've got it arranged in here, and then panels, and canvas, and then that got to
the idea of fat over lean, and that got the glazes and medium, and then signing paintings, and it just
sort of grew and grew. I think it's up about 20 minutes right now, but the thing is there's a lot
of good information in there and I haven't put the names so often in the video, but all not links, but
the names of everything, I mentioned is down below and if you know there's some gaps and things I've
covered, you know, we can get them another time. It's not quite the slick video production I hadn't
originally envisioned but it's what I could do one guy with an iPhone. So our studio is a two-car
garage about 450 square feet about a 40-foot commute from home so there's my painting station,
and my easel, and then you'll recognize this from the videos where I filmed them, and then all the
books and the flat files and so on, and then these are the two doors that used to be a big sliding
garage door up the ceiling but now are big barn doors which let more air and light in, and then
more books this is my wife's side of the studio so she's got some of her paintings here and she
has two lights above her easel station in addition to the rest of it what I'll be showing you in
just a second back to the door again but then I want to show you the lighting because lighting's
important. We've got two north facing - that bars where I do the video from for the palette - two
north-facing skylights and then a bank of lights warm and cool floods right up at the peak, 12
feet above the floor. Now in terms of pencils I use black wing matte pencils and the matte is
like about a 4b and they look like this and I'll show you how I normally sharpen them because I
don't stick them in a sharpener. I sharpen them like this I'm looking at the cameras I do this
not at the thing itself but I like a fairly long... Now I've seen people do it so that their lead is
about two inches of exposed lead and to my mind um I mean anyway I would just snap the lead off in
no time but I like to get and I'll show you why a fairly long lead, um so you just
kind of keep taking a little bit off until you get a nice pretty
long piece of it and then the what you're looking to do is get that chisel now those are for laying the
big flat masses, obviously you can have a point and you can use this for a point, but you want to,
once you've got this, just knock a little bit off the end like that and you've got that
chisel. And then in terms of paper I like these two papers - Stonehenge warm white
and the Bristol Strathmore Bristol smooth surface. I love those two for drawing.
My palette is a 30 by 24 inch piece of glass with gray paper underneath.
The paint I use primarily is Gamblin. Just so you know nobody's paying me this
week for advertising any of their stuff. That is a studio-sized tube and that's
what I use for everything in the studio and then I use smaller tubes of the same
for plein air painting. And I've gone through the list of colors before but let's just do it
quickly. We have titanium white, cad yellow lemon, cad yellow medium, yellow ochre, cad orange, cad
red light, alizarin crimson, dioxazine purple, ultramarine blue with a space there for cobalt
blue, chrome oxide green, phthalo green, and then two spaces there for raw umber and ivory black,
which I sometimes use. Now you may prefer some other colors in there. I mean that's I have
a logic to the order, it's the color wheel. Right from yellow through to red to purple to blue
to green and it's just like I've opened it up like that. So there's a logic to the order, but the most
important thing is whatever colors you choose put them in the same order on your palette.
You've got so many things to think about when you're painting that when you can just put that
thing into complete order, so that like if you notice my painting when I'm mixing how quickly I'm
sometimes grabbing paint, it's because that order of my colors has been there for over 20 years and
a half the time I'm going for the color before I've even thought about what I need. It's like
a pianist, you know, it's just that order is set and it really is a helpful tool. Now easels I have
a Cappelletto and I have a stand here where the computer shows me what I'm painting so I can
paint this this is something that I just built I had a bunch of jerry rig panels to hold it
all together but when you have a small panel on a big easel like that there's nothing really
to hold it so this allows me to have different panels up until we get to about 20 by 20 inches and then
it'll hold itself. So this is a crank I really like this I don't think they make it anymore to export
it's made in Italy but Mabef and Jack Richardson, again I'll put those names down below, make large
good studio easels as well. My favorite brushes of all time are Manet from France and even when you
grind the heck out of them they still really hold their form. But unfortunately they went bankrupt a
couple of years ago and you can't get them anymore so down below I've listed all the manufacturers
that I think are completely adequate and make I'm still sort of looking for something to replace it
but in terms of size, oops let me put this one here, I would have number two, number four, number six, and
number eight. And you can do pretty much everything with that and then maybe you might have I take a
number four or a number six synthetic watercolor brush just if there's details and when they
start looking like that I just throw them away and then there are my chipped brushes the ones
I've shown you before that I do for the big block-ins and you can sort of see them as they
get older the first time you use them it'll just leave hairs all over your canvas it's kind of
annoying but before long that's gone the first time and then that's gone. But look at this
one here when you get up really close here you see the edge there if you get paint good
thick paint and you're just laying that softly on something else, you get some beautiful effects
with something like that, and the only way to get it really is by wearing it out. In terms of
cleaning brushes supposing I've got this paint here and I want to get up I use that thing on
the bottom to softly sort of wipe the paint off, and then wipe it and I can still see there's
some of this on there so I'm going to wipe it off some more and I'll do that two
or three times squeezing it quite a bit, making sure until, well there's still a little
left, by there that's pretty much it. And that's the way I leave the brush I don't ever use soap
and water I find that I can go straight back into mixing, there might be a little bit of mineral
spirits on when I mix the next, but not very much, or I could just leave it until the next day, and
as I say I don't do it with soap and water because I find it makes the bristles too soft and I just
like the way they feel after they've been cleaned about that much. So I used to paint on for you know
smaller paintings I use RayMar panels oil primed Claessens double primed linen and they come white
but I tone them different things this is the color that I would have it most often. But they're about
$12 and so if that seems pricey, I mean you can buy those cheap panels that you get in any art supply
store for a couple of bucks and I'll show you how you can, because I hate the surface of them, when
you're putting in paint it just seems like all you get are little holes between the each brush
mark, I'll show you how you can improve the surface with acrylic or with acrylic gesso and then you
can also try I feel like I'm you know this is a can of tomato sauce or something, but if you can
get the gamblin makes one, fredricks makes one, oil prime ground you can try putting a layer of that
on because I like the surface an oil prime surface. Acrylic is more absorbent and some people prefer
that I prefer an oil ground which is a little bit loud allows the brush work to kind of stand out
a little bit more. So you can just take some gesso like this is a liquitex but any good gesso put
a little bit on a thing then use an old credit card this is actually is a air miles thing for
something I don't use anymore and you just wipe it and it fills in the holes. I find those things
are really hard to paint on because there's so many little holes you spend more time trying
to fill the holes then you do paint them and then when you've got, I've put on
a little bit more than you need here... some off there. And you get a surface of it like that and you
might just go back one more time very lightly to get those last few ridges out, and you
might do two coats like that, but you'll find that you'll start to fill those little holes
up and they'll be much easier to paint on. I know I often get the comment that it seems
to be so easy the way I put the paint on and I'm not using any medium so I just want to
show you how it goes on on a canvas, cotton canvas, and a linen panel and you'll see the difference
and why it looks so much easier on the linen panel. The surface you paint on - this is just
12 oz canvas with a layer of gesso on it, you know, it's you really have to kind of push
a bit to get the paint in there, and if you're scratching like this, you're really not getting
any paint on you're really having to grind it just to get rid of the little white dots. Now
the next one over is a is an a RayMar panel, much smoother canvas, and you know, you can get
the paint on there because everyone says, oh it seems you get it on so easily - it seems to flow
without a medium. But again if you try to do this, you're sort of looking at grinding paint back in
and by the time you've done that, you've covered the surface. But look at what happens on a linen
panel this is Claessens double primed and you know you get the paint on okay, but look at what happens
when you do this it interacts with the surface, right, there's no holes now. I'm playing with the
brush mark on that surface so that I can enter my brush marks actually hold there so it's worth
perhaps trying it but the first thing to remember is that the surface you paint on is a very
personal thing and there's no right or wrong on it. Those washes on the left are lean you'd have to
put thick paint on there in order for it to hold. but this is thicker paint, right? This is Alloprima -
fat into fat. You don't have to worry about this just fat into fat. That's it - it works. And then
let's talk about oiling out. Now what that means is different pigments absorb oil in different ways
and so sometimes you'll see that when you see your painting is dry and you're coming back to it,
some of it's a little glossy, some of it's a little matte, and also the colors tend to kind of sag a
bit. So if you take some linseed oil, maybe half linseed oil - half mineral spirits, and you put it on
a rag or a brush, and you just brush it very thinly over your whole canvas and then take a dry cloth
and wipe it back. What it does is it unifies the matte glossy part and it also kind of brings
the colors out and just gives the surface a nice surface to be painting on when you've got a
dry painting that you're going to work on again. So let's talk about mediums for a minute
because this gets back to the idea of thin paint - lean paint, thick paint - fat paint,
and then once you've got good layer of oil paint on there, or acrylic really, what do you put on top
of that so that it'll stick because if you just use turpentine or water in your paint, it won't
stick. So you need a medium. Now acrylic medium, that's fairly simple, it's not very toxic. The
problem with the mediums that you get to use in oil painting is they're toxic. They smell really
bad. So a common one say is liquin, it's modern. It's hard to be painting with liquin on your
canvas and smelling that all the time. Now I hate liquin as something to mix with paint I like
the thick viscosity of oil paint and using that. I hate thinning it out. But if you're putting a
glaze on and you're just wanting a transparent glaze over something - you need something. So I'm
going to show you liquin and then I'm going to show you another thing which, well I'll mention
it because it's using, here I'll just get it, it's epoxide oil, and it's linseed oil that's been
copolymerized. Now linseed oil is flax oil and we eat it but the problem is it's very glossy so
when it's done you've got a real problem with gloss, that's the problem with all mediums, you've
got the problem of gloss in areas where you use it and no gloss where you're not. So in the end
then you've got to put a layer of varnish over the whole thing to pull it all together.
So mediums start to get complicated and really I stopped using them years ago. I used to
use this formula when I was making paintings back a long time ago using that and then also this is
the one that I actually came to and enjoyed a lot, except for probably what it did to my brain cells.
So let me just show you what glazing is doing and scumbling because you may have had that term,
and we'll just have a quick look at that. The main thing with the whole tradition of glazing is
you use transparent color this is a transparent or gold oxide and just like you would look in
an old master painting, you put the white down and then you put the glazes on top so it becomes
luminous. Now you can put in colors that are dark and they would have their own quality that
would be different from just painting straight, but that's glazing. And scumbling
is taking an opaque glaze and putting two layers of color that interact together
in a way, I'm just putting it on loosely so you get the idea, but that in now I'm using liquin here
because it's just simple and it's available, but it's smelly and uh you know you have to deal
with that in terms of whether you really want to be doing working with glazes. One medium you
might find interesting though is Dorlands oil wax. Dorlands wax medium. And you see that is laying
that glaze in. Here you can see with a darker one if it's too smooth but you can sort of
get a layer of color in and Dorlands cold wax medium. There it is. Is also
really good for just laying in big thick impastos of paint where you want the brush marks
to really be showing and the thing I like about it is that it's matte when it's dry, so when it's
completely dry you can kind of put a thin layer of final varnish on it and it'll just kind
of pull it up to the surface of everything else. And finally when it comes to signing paintings
I choose a color that kind of blends into the painting itself so you don't really see it and
it's not very large or with a plein air painting I sometimes just scratch the name right into
the surface at the end and finally when I leave for the day my palette and brushes look like
that ready for the next day. I couldn't stand coming back to something like this and having
to go through cleaning it up before beginning to paint. So I'm back in my regular chair and it
feels comfortable over here. As I said there's a lot of information in that thing so please do like
the video if you enjoyed it and I do understand that if I've maybe skipped over something that
it was just like it was going to go on forever, if I just kept expanding on everything every
single point, if you have a question just put a comment down below. Now I'll read every
single one and I'll acknowledge that I've read it but I'm not going to type out specific
answers, what I'm thinking is at another point I can take and consolidate all those comments
and make a second video or I'm also thinking to maybe go live one week, I'm checking out the
technology for that, so you could be posing your questions and we could be answering them live so
that's something that I'm looking forward to doing in a few weeks but I do hope you found it helpful
as I say, please do like the video, of course please do subscribe, and I will see you next Tuesday.
I hope you have a great week. And bye, for now!
