Learning How To Paint with a Pro Oil Painter - My first time painting

if I said to you I can't paint what is your response to that my response to that is I'm going to prove you wrong [Music] today I find myself in an artist's studio eating a custard tart I'm here not just to eat a casita but uh to learn how to paint I have done very little painting in my life I don't think I've done any painting since I was at school but I am very lucky today to be being taught by a professional oil painter I'm here with Neil and after I've eaten this custard tart and drunk my tea we're going to paint something maybe not quite as nice as that or that or that but I'm going to learn how to paint my father was a very very accomplished artist self-taught and had researched and studied for many many years he was fascinated by the Old Masters so and Turner in particular but the Dutch artists and the classical artists the classical oil painters his knowledge art was phenomenal so I grew up with that as a child I mean there's a young boy my father would take me to art galleries and museums and talk to me about art and so on and it was always on TV and there were always a stack of books around and I did art at school and I quite enjoyed it I did a level art 1979 your first Neil Adams oil paint absolutely and and you know so that was it I painted quite a lot as a as a teenager and into my 20s and so on but then I I got involved in the work that I was doing which was something completely different and then it really wasn't until he he passed away that was the big Catalyst for me to get back to painting because I suddenly realized after he died that he had an amazing knowledge and he was this incredible repository of knowledge and I hadn't really tapped into that so I felt very guilty very silly for the fact that I hadn't spent more time with him and I tried to remember everything he taught me but slowly bit by bit I started to practice and remember more of what he taught and of course as you progress in any subject those lessons come back to you and the more you practice the more those lessons make sense and you understand what they what they mean but I've been painting seriously now for about the past 10 years [Music] so the first step today really is to get the canvases select the canvases and then to Mark out on the canvases the shapes that we're looking for what is this canvas made of It's a cotton canvas on panel it's on a hard cardboard panel later panel but it's great because they're they're very very strong they're hard they don't flex they Flex a little bit they're also great for art students because they're easy to carry and when you're when they're dry you can stack them up you know and they're very strong in an oil canvas or oil painting on canvas is a very robust finish as well so things like watercolors and anything done on paper is quite fragile and obviously needs to be generally be protected with glass whereas an oil painting and think with an oil painting is it needs to be left it needs to be left to have oxygen because it's the oxygen that allows the paint to cure because the paint cures for oxidization as opposed to say watercolor or acrylic which dries through evaporation what am I going to try and paint today I went traveling last year to some incredible mountainous areas and I kind of fell in love with the the mountains and the clear air of the Alps and I decided that I'd like to try and paint one of the scenes from my Travelers last year here it is mountains of the Austrian Alps certain visual things as humans we all connect to certain things so we connect to sunsets we connect to the visible world and and the humanity that we all share living on one big ball and that's that's an incredible thing because art is a is a language which is is genuinely Universal [Music] is it normal to feel nervous at this point where you've got the the blank canvas yeah I've never done painting before I've never I've never done something like this so I I fear that I lack the skills I'm a little bit scared but that's a good thing right being a little bit scared what did you call it enough nerves nerve sighted is Neil's word for this nervously excited when I went skiing for the first time that was more I had all these people around me looking at me or I felt like they were looking at me all these Pro skiers like who could do it really well and I was the beginner yeah here luckily I've just got you so what we're going to be doing is we're going to be looking at the colors we're going to look at the structure we're going to break it down into the sky at the background the mountain range in the mid ground obviously and then this lovely cloud form and then the foreground so we've essentially got one two three four bands one two one two one two one two yeah we need a proper Clapper board but I don't have one so when we're mapping out we're going to use charcoal this is Vine charcoal it's very very thin okay um basically it's a cooked charcoal that's the same stuff which you should put on your face that's exactly the same stuff I'm just kind of marking out proportions um and as you can see I'm using the charcoal quite lightly I don't know why this is scaring me this is gonna be the hardest part of today doing the first yeah well we're touching the thing for the first time yeah I'm realizing already how much I'm looking at this image more than I've ever looked at it before that's important even when I was editing it I didn't look at it like this closely I didn't look at where things are or where the lines are just trying to put something down on on a board is making me look at it more than I exactly did it before but that's nice because we've got a line here a diagonal here that will bring the eye in a lot of the time people view paintings from left to right is that natural because of the way we learn to read absolutely right let's talk about paint paint yeah so in terms of palette what we're looking at is we're looking at Blues we're looking at blues and Grays gray a gray Grays are incredibly important my father used to say to me you know son learn to paint you learn to mix your Grays and in particular learn to mix your warm and cool grays and I didn't understand that and I thought well great great really really boring color you know all the colors you can choose gray isn't that color but Grays are very very important and in particular these warmer and cooler Grays so the paint mixing really is quite straightforward because we know whether we're going to work on a blue and there are two Blues typically that people would tend to go for French ultramarine which is a very hot blue and I'll explain that in as much as it's got quite a lot of red to it so it's got a strong vibrant blue but then we've got Cerulean blue which is a very popular blue and especially popular for painting scenes that are a very warm climate whether it's you know a nice beach scene in The Bahamas but not necessarily naturalistic for a for a sky scene in Britain because the blue is a little bit too blue a bit too yellow but what we're going to do is we're going to use a little bit of each in this instance just to get to that blue and then we're going to mix that with white so that we can then get our get our color as accurate as we possibly can so when we lay out a palette we have a working area that gives us space to put the paint down um and that's what I call our sauce paint so I'm putting that down as our sauce paint and then I'm going to bring the paint down as I mix it but I want to keep my it's like laying the ingredients out for cooking and you lay them out and you put them in front of you so you put everything that you need so you want those two Blues but we're also going to use a brown as well because that Brown is going to help us to cool the blue off a little bit and gray the blue blue and gray blue and brown mixed together will give you a gray in this instance I'm using raw umber so I've got a Cerulean blue I've got an ultramarine blue and I'm using a raw under and when I lay my palette I'm laying my palette out from light to dark which means the only other color that I need to then add my white and we're going to use titanium white for this which is a very popular white it's the whitest white you can get it's very opaque has very high opacity and it's very very Stark very shiny tip x white and then we're going to use the medium which is liquid which is a proprietary medium which is used to thin both in the paint but also to act as a drying medium so this is an accelerant although it comes out and it looks as if it has a color to it when that dries it's completely colorless it won't affect the color of the paints whatsoever I'm going to use my palette knife or my painting knife technically as I would call it and this is just really about feel and again just like being a chef what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to mix my color one step at a time and I'm trying not to contaminate my sauce paint so I'm going to put a little bit of each down on there and a little bit of brown there as well and I'm going to use a bit of white so I can see my color I'm not going to use the medium just yet but I'm going to bring some of those together and I'm trying to build a bit of a spectrum of color so I've got a darker blue to start with and then I've got a lighter blue now as I add some white into this we can start to see what kind of color we're going to get to now I'm going to add a little bit of medium because that just helps to make the paint a bit more fluid and really mixing your first color is really important because that's going to become your starting point and all your colors are going to work from that and now you can see as I bring more white in [Music] thank you and I can see that that's a little bit green so I want that to be a little bit more blue [Music] so in a way I'm almost kind of painting on my palette [Music] we don't want to just stick it into the paint but I'm only putting paint on one side of the brush and there's a reason for that because I want one side of the brush to apply the paint and I want the other side of the brush to be able to move the paint that paint all the way across the top always remember to paint right off the edges of the canvas we can clean the edge up with the canvas with a piece of cloth and we need to but I'm just going to work the paint in and one band is all I want to do to start with it's just to judge how that blue presents on the canvas whether it's the right color and the right tone and I would say that's fairly good we've made a number of strips like a darker blue at the top and then a lighter blue at the bottom and now the aim is to blend them together just like if you were looking at the sky it's a smooth gradient between colors it's not like one color and then suddenly it's another color [Music] so this is called a blending brush it's just a wide it's just a one two inch brush so I'm just using that so soft but again it's a bristle we're just going to use that to blend we're going to start at the top and we're going to push fairly hard and we're going to drag it down and lift off and then we're going to wipe it yeah stepping back is really important when you're painting because there's a place for painting and there's a place for seeing and they're not the same place so if you stand and this is why a lot of people who try and sit when they're painting if you're painting very very small you can sit because you can work at arm's distance but if you imagine that painting hanging on the wall a person walks in the room they're going to see it at a distance they might see the 10 or 15 or 20 feet so the painting needs to look effective at a distance and if you're on top of it you can't see the painting you're only looking at small individual Parts what we want to do is to look at the whole painting So by stepping back that gives us a much better View and we can see the whole painting and we can instantly see errors more by stepping back so constantly paint make a mark step back and judge it what we're always doing is we're trying to add paint or move paint or remove paint or change the painting and then by stepping back we're judging it and we're deciding what's correct what needs correcting I can still see very yeah so you can see those distincts I can see the bands yeah so what you need to do now and the distinct bands are very prominent here [Music] so the next step is we're going to put the mountains in we're going to put the mountain shapes in but what we need to remember is we need to paint the darkest part of the mountains first so if you look here we've got this tone this dark tone here then we've got this blue here which is a lighter tone of the mountain and then we've got these very very pronounced creamy highlights which obviously reflect our snow reflecting off the light reflecting off the snow always remember the oil painting in general you're always working from dark to light you put your darkest colors on first and then the painting becomes lighter and lighter and light until you add the lightest elements at the very end and even just by leaving a slightly rough and Raggedy edges that's helping me to create a little bit of interest and a bit of texture I think by you doing it first it makes it even more daunting because then I have a comparison thank you yeah you're using a lot of concentration yeah this part in particular you know up close look at that it's just scruffy isn't it yeah but now when you step back you're enjoying it yeah it's it's tiring on my eye I don't look at things this closely normally we've just had a little lunch break and it's a nice chance to sit back and take a wider view of what we've done this morning I I was I'm feeling quite happy about it actually it's really cool to be able to see the the change from a completely blank white canvas to now like you can see the structure you can see the mountains and the sky and the gradient as the sky goes from dark to lighter I'm using a vertical stroke on the brush [Music] so we're going to put the central lights in through the middle which obviously represents that beautiful Mist that was sitting in the valley when you took the photograph so we're using the titanium white and we're using a yellow because yellow because it's got a lovely gold and Rich texture to it we're going to just start to add this little bit of light but we're putting the darkest lights in first now this is where we've got at this stage of the painting we've got to be very careful now that we don't blend these colors in too much and as I said I'm using the darker color first do you ever get overwhelmed by all the decisions you have to make whilst painting perhaps [Music] we can use a skin of paint where we can apply the whole surface we can use a small spot of paint or we can use a bead of pen we're going to need a bead of paint so we're going to pull this knife through just a very very small thin bead of paint this is by far the hardest part putting the streaks of light color on the mountains but definitely gives the picture the most impact [Music] well after my last art lesson in class 10 at school I never thought I would revisit the subject of painting but I did I'm 24 now and I can't quite believe how much I enjoy myself I'm also surprised about how tired I am I don't know I got a mixed feelings I can see that it's not the best painting and I can see that there could be so many improvements but I'm also quite proud of myself that I have painted a picture and I haven't done that for over 10 years but it's all thanks to Neil really I would highly suggest you check out Neil's stuff on social media I'll leave all the links down below that was a fun day I think possibly the biggest lesson I've learned today is to use my eyes more I never realized how much of painting it is looking and I have never looked so closely at an image before then today where I am having to put it down on my own canvas I never thought I'd do phazing again and I hope this video maybe inspires you to give it a go too I didn't think I could paint I didn't think I was capable of doing this but I have thanks for watching I'll see you soon foreign [Music]

Channel: Just Alex

Views: 59,888

Keywords:

Id: AuR6rGhdMoA

Length: 18min 22sec (1102 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2023