Painting a Portrait in Oil

hey y'all my name is Miriam and it's time to paint so go grab your paint brushes and let's get started today we're painting portraits now I'm going to take you through my whole process starting from the reference photo all the way through the finishing layers of our portrait now I encourage you to follow along especially during the reference photo part however if taking self-portraits or taking your own reference photos isn't your thing don't worry I'll go ahead and post the reference photo that I used for this portrait plus a few others up on my patreon so that if you want to follow along step by step you can do that now with that being said let's get started all right so let's talk about equipment first now for shooting my reference photos um a lot of times I just use my iPhone but for this one I used my digital camera which is a Nikon Z6 it's a mirrorless camera super easy to work with and I have it plugged in via USB to my computer so that I can Shoot Tethered while doing this now Lightroom this program that you see right here is called Lightroom um it's how I organize and edit all of my reference photos I find it super helpful but what this has is an option to Shoot Tethered to your camera which means you can have your camera set up in one area and you can watch you can see what's happening on your computer screen so what I'm doing in these photos it's hard to tell but I am sitting next to my computer and I'm watching myself on the computer screen so I can see that if I'm in focus if my lighting is set up um I can see how the final pose is going to look and I find that really helpful um being able to Shoot Tethered now um oh second part of the equipment is my lighting for this I'm using a really cheap simple ring light it's the one that I'm being lit by right now I'm pointing up to it I know you guys can't see it on the on your end um but it's what's lighting me I think I got it for like $30 you can pick it up at Walmart um they're super super simple I like I have this one has two knobs one where I can control the power and one where I can control the color temperature I find that really helpful as well too so when I have my light set up I had it set up pretty high in front of me kind actually lit almost how I am now now there's a few things I'm looking for when I'm taking my reference photo and that's a good mix of highlights and shadows um so I can see I have a lot of nice soft highlights but what's really important are the shadows and there's um like three or four main areas where I look for shadows and one is under the brow bones under the nose under the top lip under the bottom lip and then under the chin and so that's how I know that I have a well lit photo for my style now not everyone has the same lighting style but I find this really easy because it helps me when it comes time to painting um I like like to squint my eyes a lot when I paint and so that I can see everything broken down into its simplest shapes if you go ahead and squint your eyes and look at this you can see those big three dark marks under the eyes and the nose and it just makes things really simple when it comes to time to paint so that's why I do that now let's talk about um okay so these are the reference photos that I came up with for this session and you'll see this one I have one that I took beforehand with no makeup on and I didn't think I'd ever you know in my life be in a position where I'd be sharing this photo on the internet um but here we are so why do I why do I normally start by taking a photo with no makeup and also if I'm hiring a model to take reference photos I often um ask them not to wear any makeup either and that's because I really want to be able to see the undertones of the skin I want to be able to see all those wonderful colors so um where I might not love it and you know these green and blue bags under and purple bags under my eyes um I might not love that in person when it comes time to paint having this information is really valuable also everywhere where it turns red um just being able to see that because when we go to the next photo you can see I have makeup on um and a lot of that is covered up a lot of that information but also it's covered up in a way that doesn't always look so natural when you have bright Lighting on it so um like in some of these areas it's turned a little gray um and so that's why I just I find it helpful I'd rather be able to reference the real natural undertones of the skin and uh it's Luminosity versus versus like this okay so these are the ones I came up with and I'll post these five up on patreon so if you guys want to um paint your own version or follow along you can and um you'll notice that two of these I cropped into square because those were the two finals that I was in between okay um and I find that cropping your reference photo to the exact dimensions of your final painting is super helpful because it gives you a whole new set of information to rely on because now okay if I were going to paint this in a square right I kind of have to guess where everything's going to go but in this version well I can see oh can you guys see my mouse yeah you can okay so if you look around the head you know I can now use this information this shape here in the corner as the Whit space information to help place my subject hopefully that all makes sense so that's why I always crop my reference photos to the exact dimensions of my canvas um so yeah another important thing I also shot these on burst mode so every time I clicked take a picture remember I'm doing this on my computer because I have my camera tethered every time I have it take a picture it's actually taking 10 pictures at once so when it's snapping I can make little tiny micro adjustments in my expressions or my pose or whatever um so that's just another helpful thing that you guys can do all right I think that's it for the the reference photo part all right one other important thing I want to bring up before we get started into the actual painting all right so um remember we've talked about it many a times our friend reflected light so I'm wearing a light gray shirt in this and if you look under my chin you can see the reflected light there um in the black here in this one when I've switched to the black uh there's really not much reflected light going on under my chin do you guys see the difference see this light line the reflected light uh here it just gets darker and darker okay why is this important because when you are painting be careful what color clothes you are wearing I almost always paint in Gray or black um because your you won't it's so subtle you won't even be able to tell in the moment but the color that you're reflecting will reflect back on your canvas so if you're wearing a red shirt you're it's going to reflect very subtly but notice like in enough way that it makes a difference it's going to reflect red back onto your canvas or if you're wearing green or blue or whatever so I like to wear neutral colors um or ideally just wear black um while I'm painting side note all right let's talk about the actual surface itself as I mentioned I'm working on a 12x 12 in panel and specifically a gesso board for this now I am prepping it with this large brush I love it it's the liquitex 4 in freestyle brush they AR costly but I feel like they're worth every single penny um it's just great for the the texture really working in large areas and priming surfaces now the gesso board is already pre- primed and prepped that's why I like buying them because it saves me a lot of time but I did want to tone it down and what I'm toning it down with here is Van Dy brown mixed with a little bit of white and some thinner and you can see I just put it on in a few areas and use my big brush to really work out and rub in those areas and you'll see that I pull out a second one and that's because often times when I'm in priming and prepping mode I'll I try and do as many canvases as I can at once so that's what you're seeing all right let's talk about the actual painting itself now you're going to notice that I start with what I almost always start with which is my Silhouette and my main Shadow shapes remember when I had you squint your eyes and look at the portrait to find the three shapes well those those are the three shapes that I put down first now this isn't exact it's not a science I'm taking my best guess here but I am using methods that I use when um actually I have a whole video on it I'll just link it up above um but I'm using those same methods to freehand all of this all right so after I um do that I start to Mark in where my warmth is going to go put in all those nice warm tones and then after that I start to Mark in the mid tones all right can you guys tell how thin the paint is at this point well that's because I've used some thinner I've used celier non-toxic green for oil thinner for this part just a little bit um a very small amount mixed into this and I'm painting these really thin layers because again all I'm really focused on now is getting shape down I want my Silhouette and I want to get the basic shapes the the big shapes like when I'm squinting my eyes what do I see that's what I'm trying to convey and copy onto the canvas um I haven't really started to think about form yet and now because everything is so thin at this point everything's really slippery it's mixing around a lot um it it is creating some gray and muddy tones and that's totally okay at this stage uh we're going to build upon this now because these are thin layers they're going to drrive really fast um within I'd say this part was probably dry within I don't know 20 minutes it was at least dry enough for me to start my actual thicker layers all right you can see now that I have the very most basic ugly looking shape up there um I'm going to go over my Silhouette one more time silhouette is so important especially when creating portraits like these um it houses a lot of information um one off thing in your silhouette can throw off you know the whole portrait so um that's why I was just really Shoring up the silhouette every everywhere there both internal and um the outside silhouette now you'll notice some if you look under the chin there's some marks where um my initial kind of crazy guesstimation was off um so you can see some of those marks sticking out that doesn't bother me it might bother some people they'd want to go in and clean it up after but seeing marks like that from the artist um I quite enjoy um that's all personal preference uh for you guys all right so now we get to get into the actual painting part or what I like to think of as the actual painting part now some important things once I hit this stage so this is really stage two for me um stage two I'm pretty much painting with the paint straight out of the tube no thinner no medium at this point um and again that underpainting is is is pretty dry so everything that I'm going over this is um is going over it pretty thickly it's not mixing into it if that makes sense um so I have my palette set up I am of course using gray palette paper neutral palette paper just helps me judge my values better helps me judge my colors especially since I'm working on a toned background anyways now the colors that I'm using here to build up my skin tones um I have have it's slightly different than my standard palette I've been just experimenting with new colors but for this one we have osar and Crimson crap LAX Rose um cadmium orange there's Naples yellow uh van djk Brown we have oh is that burnt sienna I'm going to go double check that for you and kremet white okay so that's what I'm using here now as I'm building up my skin tones I want you I want to explain the way that I think think about this how I'm processing this in my head so we have this really muted kind of Muddy gray shape down right that we created in step one that's important for me because it sets the Baseline so the way that I'm thinking about this in my head is imagine my head as a cross-section right all right imagine cross-section and imagine each cross-section is coming closer in space so like if I cut a cross-section here versus here versus here okay like my forehead is coming closer let's move to the camera my forehead is coming closer to you in space my nose is coming closer to you in space my cheekbones are coming closer to you in Space versus if I turn to the side you know everything else is going back into space okay so as I'm thinking about this for every layer that I do for every area that's coming closer into space I'm building up my saturation and I'm building up the consistency see the thickness of my paint and um that's how I'm really able to bring my I I feel like bring my portraits to life help create this this really volumetric sense of form um in my portraits let me show a sped up version right now cuz it it can be a little hard to tell seeing it slowed slowed down so let's look at it sped up and you can see as we go on we really at every single layer I do I am increasing the saturation of my colors all right let's watch all right I don't know hopefully that helped um you can see the difference between this beginning stage and the final stage um it's really just a difference in the chroma of the colors and my rendering um you can and rendering is a personal preference right you can render things out really realistically you can leave them rough I like to leave a mix of both in my paintings that's up to you but really the big thing here is understanding chroma um form and light um so yeah as you see me go through um every time I go over an area I'm just going to be thinking to myself what is actually happening in terms of form um like what is the shape actually doing what's the closest simple shape that I can get to how can I render that out and how can I bring that further into space using saturation or chroma um value and Hue all right um so yeah I'm going to let this play out and you guys can see um we'll give it a few minutes and then I'll come back in a few and and we'll keep talking [Music] w [Music] w [Music] w [Music] [Music] all right let's pause and I want to talk about one other piece of equipment I haden't talked about yet and that's brushes and for this the majority of this painting I'm using round brushes which I typically don't use I typically use Flats um but for this one I'm I'm mostly using round brushes and a lot of smaller brushes and I quite enjoyed the process I think I'm going to incorporate them more into my flow um but you can see I'm using a a pretty small brush here and um again that's just helping me get into those small areas and really think about rendering um I've been kind of a nut about it lately just I I used to get so bothered by it but now I found it really meditative and really fun just to put all my time and energy into rendering out small areas I don't know it's kind of a change for me um but I've I've enjoyed the process so again as I'm going in you can see how much more saturated um higher and chroma these colors are that I'm I'm putting in and then just rendering them blending them into the other areas now I do want to point out that this is not actually 100% correct um and a lot of my portraits aren't and again that goes back to um you know Perfection isn't always the key believability is and um if I really cared about it that much I'd go in and fix it like I know my the eyes aren't absolutely perfect probably the left side of my face I've lost some of the edges there um my lips I know aren't aren't fully exactly right but but that's okay what I'm trying to do is capture a moment capture a spirit um capture a feeling right um not necessarily going for 100% accuracy if you were working on a commission or something like that where accuracy did really matter then then yeah you'd probably want to go in and fix some of those areas but for me none of this bothers me um I quite enjoy I quite enjoy it um yeah so I'm going to let it play a little more and um I'm trying to think oh okay so this we have just switched into these layers now so this is the next day and you'll see I have this little jar there we go this it was stuck to my desk okay we have this little the bottom of my jar melted oh my gosh this is what this is the little plastic jar the solvent jar that I bought from from Blicks the lid just melted off onto my desk um I'm kind of like shocked right now okay wow oh my gosh I have these all over my studio okay sorry um but the what I'm using for this you see that little jar It's Kind it's clear so it's a little hard to see at the bottom of my easel that is filled with let's find it I'm going to go excuse me I'll be right back all right here it is it is filled with Gamblin solvent-free gel and that's the medium that I'm using for this so throughout this process we've still followed the you know thick over thin roll um and I've had this forever I've tried using it many times and I never really loved it until this painting um I really quite enjoyed it and I just used a little tiny bit um you're not supposed to use more than 25% by volume when mixing in with your colors so I did make sure to adhere to that um but yeah just a little tiny bit um to help smooth in some of those areas and again right now just really focused on rendering so I'll let this play out a little bit more [Music] all right this area I actually um you're going to see me paint this dark right into here and you can see my paint underneath wasn't as fully dry as I thought it was and it it was like tacky dry and so when I put the fresh paint over it instead of Gliding Over It Like stuck to the paint underneath and created this really weird texture which I hate hate hate in my portraits um and I try and avoid at all cost but you can see that happened there so what I had to do was just it pained me but I just had to leave that area alone move on um and wait until it it dried a little bit more um I should have waited even longer than that I did eventually go in and fix that area but that's just something to be aware of um is trying to avoid tacky paint if possible or else it creates weird issues all right and this is it this is where I'm going to leave it um I think I finished off the eyeballs and I made a few just a few small changes on um while I was painting on live so that's not recorded but yeah this is it and it's like I said before it's not a technically perfect portrait but it's one I really enjoy it's one I had a lot of fun painting um it was a very fun Challenge and I hope you guys join me and try and create your own version of this either with my reference photo or with your own now if you're a part of my patreon feel free to send your um final version to me I'm happy to take a look or to Pro provide any feedback if you want it or if you just want to share it with the group I think it'd be a lot of fun all right bye guys thanks for watching

Channel: Miriam Paints

Views: 12,471

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Id: YIPb4ymlQLc

Length: 24min 31sec (1471 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 17 2024