Paint Better Portraits With This Practice Method

so I like to use what I call isolated learning to teach portrait painting now you're probably asking yourself what is isolation learning well when you're trying to learn a complex skill like painting portraits what you need to do is break that complicated skill down into subskills and focus on one subskill at a time so you want to isolate one aspect of portrait painting that you want to get better at and focus on that in one exercise or one painting at a time it's kind of like golfing you know golfers will break their swing down into different stages and focus on just practicing that one stage of their swing but when it comes time to actually golf they say that they just want to forget about it and then just play and just swing that might not be the best comparison because not everybody golfs I've actually never golfed in my life uh what's another example that a lot of more people could relate to oh curling you know like when you're curling um okay maybe that was not a good one either when you learn to drive you know you learn to accelerate you learn to break you learn to check your mirror you learn to put it in park put it in reverse windshield wipers turn signal you learn all those different things but when it comes time to drive you just have to go and utilize all those skills at once and improvise same goes with portrait painting and if you have to make other aspects of portrait painting easier to practice the one aspect that you want to practice do it for example if you struggle with drawing you can grid up your portrait or trace it that way you don't have to worry about drawing and you can focus on getting better at form getting better at color values or maybe you don't like your brush work so you do a master copy from A Portrait Painter that you really like and you try and mimic their brush work and see what it feels like to paint the way they do some I've learned over 20 years of painting and teaching thousands of students is that the process of learning to paint is kind of about hearing the same information over and over in different ways until it finally clicks and in my experience when teaching students when you can kind of just isolate one point and just focus on that one point while you're practicing and learning it can make that one point click a lot faster for the longest time I just thought oh I'll just paint a bunch of portraits and I'll just naturally get better from painting portraits which I did but looking back that was definitely a slower way of doing it and I could have benefited a lot from somebody kind of isolating certain aspects of my portrait painting that weren't that good and focusing on those and exercises I mean that's why I created my perfect portraits path on patreon I got over 50 portrait tutorials on there but I went in and hand selected five specific tutorials and put them in a certain order to give my students structure and their learning because each tutorial focuses in and isolates one aspect of portrait painting like the first one in the portrait path is this Sergeant Master Copy but it's done in distinct stages of using just flat shapes now I get a lot of people asking me like oh like what filter do you use to get these flat shapes it's not a filter I just had to go in by hand on Photoshop and make these if you have Photoshop this is actually a great exercise in of itself and for this exercise I use a grid to draw in the head so even if you struggle with drawing you can still do this exercise now this exercise is really helpful because it's going to help simplify the way you look at face you know hopefully this gets you to see shapes and more specifically see big shapes at first and get those in and then progressively find smaller and smaller shapes like I know looking at a face can seem really complicated like I distinctly remember when I was really little like 8 or n years old I would look at a face like on a magazine or something and think how could I ever draw that you know this is back when I was just drawing and it seemed so far away and it seemed so unattainable but I knew if I just kept practicing I could get there I didn't know how I was going to get there but I knew the way to get there was practice and looking back one of the biggest things I was doing wrong was I was seeing too many details I wasn't focused on the shapes if I would have focused on the shapes it would have made things a whole lot easier this is also going to help you with painting light to dark which I really like to do with oil paints because it's a lot easier to lighten the color as you go opposed to darkening it a lot of times I'll see students and they will make their paint too light too quick and then they'll have to go back in and darken it and it takes a lot of paint to darken that lighter paint that's already on the canvas and what happens is the paint starts to build up and it kind of becomes muddy or chalky or the color gets washed out or just too thick and unworkable lastly it's going to help you with edges and transitions between these shapes because after we get the smallest shapes I go in and finesse the edges of these shapes and add in more details and really bring the uh portrait to completion once you got all the shapes on there you do what I like to call pushing and pulling the paint you know you know maybe you put some lighter values in maybe you put some darker values in you adjust shapes you work what you already have on the canvas you manipulate the paint that's one of the benefits I feel to oil paint is that once it's on the canvas it's very workable this was a very popular tutorial with my patreon students I feel like a lot of them who would normally be intimidated to try a portrait saw that this was just done by building simple shapes and they gave it a try all right next is this alter white portrait tutorial and this one specifically helps you with keying in the right values now on this one I actually introduce a new way to draw in the portrait I use a proportional divider to get key measurements to help me draw in the head and I'm using what I learned in the previous tutorial of blocking the face out in simple shapes of flat color just getting the light and Shadow first I do it with a wash of brown paint that's just paint and paint thinner to get it dry drawn out and then I go in with flat color then I'm going to do something a little different I'm going to actually get in the lightest light on the face to use as a key now I'm putting this in without the intention of leaving it there till the end like I'm fully okay getting rid of this later or reworking it but I just want to have it there so I know what my lightest light is that's going to help me gauge values going forward you know I also get my darkest dark in really early so now I have my lightest light and my darkest dark which is a really helpful little tip to gauge your values as you go this is also one of the most popular tutorials uh with my students I feel like because the reference photo has very distinct light and Shadow in the face it makes it a fun one to paint and you know just very clear what needs to be light and what needs to be Shadow all right next is the pl face exercise so we're going to paint the face but comprised of simple planes and then after that we're going to add in even more planes to get more specific form with the face and thinking of the face in terms of planes is going to help you see color shifts and value shifts a lot easier just like when I have my students paint plain fruit for still life you know I want the plain shifts and the color shifts to be very clear and obvious cuz faces are smooth and a lot of times it's hard to tell especially in a photograph when the value shifts and gets darker or lighter this is also going to help you get a better understanding of the form of the face it's also going to help you with skin tones the fact that the face is broken down into just these flat color shapes is going to help you see what colors really make up the face and kind of how gray certain colors can be how neutralized certain colors can be and it's also going to show you how subtle the shifts in color and value can be on the face now you've probably seen a lot of painters myself included do the painting of the pl head model that's from the assaro pled head which I do highly recommend getting I'll put a link to John asaro site where you can buy this plain head but this one's different you're probably not going to see many like this again because there's no like filter or anything you can get to do this like I literally went in on Photoshop and by hand painted in these planes which again is a great exercise to do on your own if you have Photoshop but it's just really fun to have color with these planes and to have like an actual face and not like the plastic gray head next is a master copy from John Singer Sergeant but this time it's all about edges and simplicity that's what we're focusing and isolating on this one Sergeant was just such a master at communicating so much with so little and I feel like this painting of his in particular showcases how much it's not about detail and I start this one out by getting some measurements to get the drawing in so you get some extra practice with that method and then again blocking out light and Shadow with flat color but this time there's going to be a lot more focus on brush work and more specifically an economy of brush Strokes you will actually see me try and keep my brush on the canvas for as long as I can with every stroke this leads to more purposeful and confident brush work in this exercise you'll learn how to blend paint on the canvas by working wet into wet paint to create soft edges soft edges are very important when it comes to communicating hair like in the beard here you'll see a lot of soft edges and just in general having a variety of edges in your portraits is very important you know I have a lot of soft edges around the beard or in the shadows where there isn't much light but in areas where there is light on solid objects like the cloth on the head here I make sure to get a hard crisp Edge I feel like edges are the main thing that distinguishes a beginner from an advanced Portrait Painter a lot of times when look at beginner's work every Edge is a hard Edge because honestly in a photo and every Edge is a hard Edge in a photo which is why it's very helpful to paint from life when you can all right last is a portrait done with the assistance of a version of the photo put in the cutout filter on Photoshop now this one I actually introduce a little more of an advanced way of drawing in a portrait using the Lumis head method this way is a little difficult to learn at first but I feel like once you do learn it you have a lot more freedom with your portraits but you don't have to do it this way if you just want to do the measurements or if you want to grid it you can do that as well now I still have the regular photo up there I just also have the cutout filter to help guide me through the portrait now this is a combination of the shapes exercise the planes exercise and the sergeant copy you'll be using what you learned from the shapes exercise because you're still going to be identifying big simple shapes at first but unlike the shapes exercise where you were stacking shapes on top of each other you know starting with bigger and then layering smaller and smaller shapes this one you're kind of putting shapes next to each other which is more like the ples exercise so you're kind of mushing those two together now since you have the cutout version of the photo up there it's going to help you with simplifying your brush work like in the sergeant copy you know you'll see me in the tutorial put my brush down on a shape and keep it there for a long time until I fully have filled in that shape and then when it comes time to working the edges of those shapes I'm doing the same thing and there's a real seamless transition from the shapes you know I don't leave the painting with those clear cutout shapes I use them at the beginning and identify them but as it goes on I use what I learned in that Sergeant copy in terms of manipulating edges and working transitions between shapes to give that smooth effect of skin on the face all right so if you want to give this painting portrait path a try you can by going to the link to my patreon which is in the description below I will see you there I'm Chris foro here telling you to go get painting

Channel: Paint Coach

Views: 35,703

Keywords: what you can do to get better at portrait painting, try this to get better at portrait painting, how I got better at portrait painting, the best way to paint portraits, how I make portrait painting so much easier, a lesson on portrait painting that will make you better, what they don't tell you about portrait painting, oil painting broken down so you can understand, learn to oil paint on your own, the keys to painting a portrait, painting tutorial for beginners

Id: RuV1pkg2sBI

Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 01 2024