Painting Demo: Maintaining the Abstraction

so I'm going to do a little painting demonstration painting this painting here of some dried grass on a table just a real quick simple still life I painted it with the Geneva Artist oil color using just the five colors in the essential palette and without further ado here's me painting the still life so I've painted this from life and I set it up in a little shadow box about four feet away from me and I'm just putting in a few marks I used a proportional divider to just to put in some basic marks that I can use as guidelines and I usually do this to some degree especially if I'm doing something symmetrical and perfect like this glass vase which really there's almost no abstraction in the shape itself there's plenty of abstraction and the way the reflections play but the shape of the vase itself is a perfect shape and so that's why I put in some marks for me to look at so if I could get it close but then the rest of it I just kind of sketched in so I probably spent maybe about fifteen minutes or so doing this little bit of penciling and then I'm done now I'm mixed up some colors which I did not show you but I mixed up a palette of colors and again this is how I paint it's not necessarily how you would paint if you're starting out for the first time there's plenty that you're going to that you can learn from from watching me paint the the basic principles are the same but you know I don't check my colors nearly as much as I would recommend somebody starting out wood and all kinds of things like that but if you're advanced and you've painted a while maybe this is this is sort of what the method has become for me and that is I don't check much I trust my instincts more I allow myself to play with shapes and colors and as you're going to see in this in this demonstration I end up painting this background about three or four times I was never happy with it but just to start with I was really just trying to paint the pattern actually when I first started painting the background I was really trying to paint the cloth the way I saw it but it didn't turn out that way so putting a little bit of background around the jar is why I painted the background not because I wanted to paint the whole background first but now I'm going to go ahead and paint the jar and I'm going to need a little table color around the edge too oh it's always a good idea to put some background around something because it allows you to bump the lines around if your vase is too big you can bump it smaller with some background color and vice versa if your vase is too small you can push it into the background you can go either way and also it's really important have something to look at so if you were starting out I would recommend you put background around the whole thing but I take all kinds of liberties and I really intentionally try to paint this exactly as if the cameras were not on I was not trying to paint a lesson or paint a painting for a lesson I was not trying to do anything specific other than have some abstract subject matter to look at and then just do my thing and try to paint a nice little still life that I that I you know liked and so as you can see here I'm pulling it pushing the background in and to make the vase a little smaller not quite as wide and also to straighten up my lines and that's a huge advantage to have in the background put in don't ever try to paint something without a little bit of background color - to have and normally I would paint the whole every last bit of background around it but now just now putting in the table but you know the more you paint the more liberties you can take the more you understand what you're doing and at this point in my career I you know I just jump all over the place and don't follow my own rules that I teach to my students but most of those rules have there's very good reasons to start that way and until you really understand color it's important to go slow and to mix your color lines and everything else you know the way I mix my palette is for this painting was very quick it didn't mix all the steps that I would recommend that my students mix it just mixed a few and I always play with my color as you can see always adjusting if I don't like the color the way it looks on the canvas then I'll make an adjustment and this is something you know and this is really speaking to somebody who's starting out or somebody without a lot of experience but you don't want to take liberties because you can put paint you can put paint on a canvas and it will look completely wrong too you don't go and change it the only way you should be making judgments about color if you're starting out is with a color checker or if you're working from a photo buy you know wiping a little bit of color on a laminated photo and checking it that way because that color checking like that will really really really teach you to see color but with my experience I do all kinds of stuff when I want to play with the color you know the table might look too gray now and as a matter of fact if I try to explain to you why I left it green it's really sort of advanced you know I tend to like to leave things slightly dirty slightly if it's if I see purple in the tabletop I can come back and put purple back into it and then I get a little dance of color between the green and the purple or the yellow and the purple so I'm just filling in on the vase here as you can see I'm always working dark to light not not in a perfect way and but I would recommend to my students that they to the best of their ability to try to work dark to light so I'm really trying to paint the look black areas in the in the in the vase now I'm going to my next step as you can see one more step from black but basically building it dark to light and I do that to this day I almost never ever will put in my lightest colors you know they're they're like they're really hard to work with and if you put in the lighter color so they they will pollute your shadows you have less room to bump things around and play once you get the lighter colors put in so I try to really only work with the darker colors as long as I can and really hold off on putting those colors in that have a lot of white in them as you can see I'm working with the really dark colors here and no way am I going to get put a reflection in now because it's just you know I may need to bump the bump the reflection around I may decide the positions wrong or whatever and as long as I don't have all those light colors in I can play and bump this vase around if it's too fat or too tall or whatever it's real easy to do and never think about whether glass is transparent or not transparent so people ask me well how do you paint things that are transparent whether it's a it's a you know transparent sleeve on a lady's arm or a glass vase or whatever it is that there is no such thing on a canvas as transparent you don't paint transparent everything you paint ultimately becomes opaque it's two-dimensional so there for you the way you paint things that are transparent is you mix the color that you see and you paint it on the canvas all in one go and if I were to go out and check those colors that I'm painting in they should match pretty good and I just paint them in and it doesn't matter and if you paint in the right colors the transparency will magically appear but there's no such thing as trying to paint transparent where you put in one layer and then try to paint a transparent layer on top to create some sort of illusion of glass that's not how you create the illusion of glass or a transparent fabric or anything else the way you create that illusion is just by putting in the right colors plain and simple one layer all a Prima you can do it in multiple layers of course but you can do it just as well with a single layer because ultimately it's just color you know that's how a camera does it that's how you know when you make a print from a camera and it comes out of your printer it's doing the very same thing there's there's no transparency it's just laying in colors and those colors give you give you the illusion of transparency so as you'll see I we're not showing all the palette shots there's plenty of times I'm going to the palette we that we're not showing it but I play with my color constantly as I paint and whether I if I decide to change things or whatever it's I'm never truly satisfied with my color and I always like to bump it one way or another and you'll see me doing that throughout this painting there are some differences in you know you guys are looking at a photograph of this setup and I'm sitting 4 feet away looking with my naked eye at this setup you know my eyes aren't as good you know as they as they used to be so I'm not seeing it quite as sharp as I would if I have my reading glasses on in a photo right in front of me just like my canvas so there's a little bit of difference in what I'm looking at and what you're looking at and then furthermore once I got beyond the bottle and even though even I say bottle the glass vase once I got beyond the glass vase I basically tried to paint this glass vase without really changing anything I like the way the stems looked you know underneath the waterline and I just decided I was going to paint it basically the way it was but I also say that I think I ended up getting mine was ended up being slightly fatter at the end or whatever and that's you know I'm not going to worry about that I don't really care if mine's a little fatter than that one or a little tall I just want it to be a pretty vase no one's going to see the original but once I got up into the grass and into the background I really took all the liberties you know anything I wanted to do I didn't hold back I just I liked it this way I I decided the grass needed to have an extra stem in it I just did whatever I wanted so I'm finally getting these colors in and as you as you'll notice I still have not putting in those very lightest bright bright reflections I'm holding off and yet you can see the bottle develop at this point once you get some of those very first highlights in like I'm starting to put now you start to see your subject and you can start to see the three dimensionality of it and everything else if you'll notice the colors of the of the stem I went ahead and I'm just painting the whole thing something like that I'm just going to paint it with the darker color and then I'll get the highlight and put it right into that darker color that I've already painted I'm not going to bother leaving a little blank spot of canvas I'm just going to take this stronger green and paint it right on top of the other and this is you know even here in these stems talking about painting abstraction it's really easy to draw a line line line but if you'll notice those I'm not there it's not really line line line there's you know one of the stem that I'm painting right there kind of joins together with the other one at the bottom you can't even see the difference between the two you know it's it's really not as simple as it looks and so take those cues from nature whenever you're looking at something like like stems or leaves or a wrinkled fabric or whatever I love to look look at the source and find the abstraction in it and just paint it in other words look for any cute any clues as to how can I paint this clump of leaves without it being leaf leaf leaf leaf that's the biggest issue you know your brain when you look at these stems you want to paint just like I've already started to do you can see how much stronger Minds my stems are line line line line and I'm pretty sure I go back and fix that later on but that's the tendency even even at this point so it's you really try to put stuff in and you know there are lines there that indicate stem but it's just not it's just not you know as much of a pattern as you think it is so main in the maintaining the abstraction is what this lesson is primarily about and you're going to see that throughout but even down here in these simple stems you maintain the abstraction or in the reflection on the bottom of the jar I keep calling it a jar so here comes a very light color and I've really held off but I feel like I'm sort of getting finished with that area down there I want to see what it's going to look like but I'm surprised that I left those stems as distinct as they are my stems are very much more line line line line they're kind of fused together more in the source and you'll notice see the brush I'm using it's not a detail brush it's a brush that's you know that's about the smallest brush ever paint with and one of the reasons I don't like using detail brushes is because they tend to you know you get a little more abstraction with a bristle brush you know if you the the hairs sticking out you know in either side they create more than just a simple shape they drag a little couple of extra thin lines on either side of the line you're painting it's hard to describe but they just make a little bit more of a mess and that little teeny bit of messiness is nice and if you try to paint with a soft detail brush you get lines just line line line it's really hard either line or your or you're just filling in with teeny little dashes and it's not the same so I've just taught myself over the years to to not use those detail brushes even when I'm putting a shine in somebody's eyes I like to use a small filbert with a teeny bit of bristle nough stew it so that I can get a little bit more of an abstract shape every time I touch my brush to the canvas I think I'm seeing some color over there and a lot of these colors one of the things that happens when you when we took a picture of this still life I was not sitting in the chair and so there may be some reflection coming off of me as I sit in the chair that you're not seeing so it's not a perfect photo but that's just I was just working from life so now I'm starting on the background and as you can see the camera is out of focus that was my fault it's just every single time you sit down I've got to refocus the thing and if the camera turns off and back on by itself the focus gets off but as you can see you get the gist of what I've done this isn't going to take us long to get through this but I'm just painting darks and then the second steps I've painted all the darks in and it's just a pattern I see in the cloth and now I'm painting all the the third step in the second step I've already painted and I'll just go through my steps like that until I get the whole background put in and you'll see it in focusing once I get finished but I'm just going through my steps and just filling in and one of the things that I do when I fill in a canvas is I try not to eat actually think too much I look over at what I'm painting and I fill in without giving any it's real easy to look at a pattern and start to want to paint more of a pattern but I literally once I have those black lines put in and I'm just filling in it's like I'm doing you know crayon painting a coloring and I'm just filling in the blank areas and letting the pattern that was already created and continue to to you know to maintain itself because otherwise if you start painting and playing you take the pattern out or actually you take the pattern out that was the abstract pattern out and you a new pattern which is you know much more contrived so these are the very lightest colors in the background and as I said before I ended up changing this background two or three times and I don't even like the last one that I painted you know this this first one here I changed it and I think I I'm not sure which background I like the most but I'm not sure that all the work that I put into it was worth it now when I'm painting this these grass dried grass it's the same old thing I'm putting in the very darkest colors that I see first and just kind of building it like that and and it really you know a lot of this is just me if you notice the dance that my brush does it's almost weird the way that I paint or the way that I move and some people ask me what in the world I'm doing but I think it's a product of years and years of trying to paint abstract and I do this mental game in my head that I can't even describe but I it's like I'm always hesitant to do the thing that I want to do and that sounds really strange but I if if I think oh I shouldn't put a dark spot there well then I'll put it there anyway and it's it's not exactly like that but it's some kind of weird thing and it also affects the way my brush dances around if you can see there's kind of a shake to it and I twist it and I move it and I do weird things and I don't even know it's hard to describe but it's that it's this very strong the whole time I'm painting I'm painting what I see but I'm trying my hardest not to paint a pattern and it's really hard to not do that and yet I have to put in some indication of stems and so I just go for it and I'm definitely looking at my source for clues looking for shapes that are not necessarily stem shapes and putting some of those in but it's a constant back and forth and trying to trying to figure out some way to maintain an abstract pattern without it becoming this you know very regular series of dashes as as you're an amateur will is tend to do and see how I'm pressing my brush on the canvas and brushing and moving it in odd ways it's a it's just a dance that I've developed over the years whenever I'm painting something that's abstract and you're going to have to just develop your own this is all driven by me looking at the still life as I paint and asking myself does my painting have more of a pattern than I'm actually seeing and I'll put my eyes out of focus you know whatever it is I do but I'll look over at the still life and I'll just ask myself does it seem does the pattern seem stronger in the puffs of seeds than it does in my painting and if the pattern does seem stronger then I'll take my brush and all smush it on the canvas or push it sideways or - in a black shape where I see one in the still life or whatever it is but be keenly aware about is there more of a pattern in my leaves or cloth or whatever it is you're painting and and you can it's not hard I mean I can you know I've seen so many students who they'll finish the whole painting and there's obviously more of a pattern in their leaves or their flowers or whatever it is they're painting then is in the still life and all it takes is for me to ask ask them and point it out and say do you see how there's more of a pattern in your leaves and they say yeah I see that yeah I see what you're talking about well you can ask yourself the question just as easily as I can so just always always be asking yourself never increase the pattern it's you know on a when you're sitting there painting it it sure is fun it sure is fun to paint patterns and we tend to like order and structure in some sort of subconscious way and we are always trying to put patterns in but it all it takes is for you to step back look at your source and say where is there more of a pattern and if there's more of a pattern in what you're doing then wipe it off scratch it smear your brush on it you know wipe it off add more to it you know whatever it takes one of the things I do a lot is just roll my brush across the Cannabis I'm sort of doing that now using the edges of the filbert brush you know as you roll it it creates a weird zig zag this is pretty deliberate because it's a very distinct blade of grass this is one of the advantages of painting wet and wet if you try to paint that grass-blade on top of dried paint it's much harder because then once you lay then you can't do anything to it and as you'll see I'm going to play with these things wipe them off repaint them but having that wet and wet is what really gives it that nice little blend as it trails off and even on the edges in a way that you can't see there's a there's a in a way that the paint all works together and that's you just don't get that when you're working wet and dry it's just a lot harder to deal with the edges of this of these seed pods is where all the real that's where you really get the definition of it and that's where you see kind of understand what you're looking at are those little funky edges where the dried seeds stick out like that this painting was actually one of the nice things about the background is it had so much burr number in it because it was so Brown that I could get away a lot more with blending those edges because normally if you take a lighter color that has a lot of titanium white in it and blend it into the background you get all this milky you know blue milky mass that really doesn't work but burr number you can blend into it and it doesn't the colors tend to tend to stay more natural and in this case that was almost perfect it's always easier to work on brown backgrounds Burr number just always blends wonderfully with whites or anything else unlike blue blue will just come out and turn everything to gray so this is just an abstract pattern that really is you know when you're looking at it up close it doesn't look like seeds or grass or anything especially if you're sitting there life-size like I was staring at it you know three feet in front of my face or two feet in front of my face but I'm constantly just analyzing the pattern and the abstraction and not worrying it all about making messes on the canvas as long as my mess looks like what I'm painting and you can see in there all those Gray's in the stems there those are no good I'm going to have to come back in there and put some color anytime you get gray or milkiness you can always take some burnt umber or some orange and throw it in there and take and get rid of it but son gray is good so now it's what's the difference point where I'm just looking at the still life and I'm asking myself what's the difference between what I'm painting and what I see over there and the color I don't like some taking some orange here far stronger than anything I would actually end up leaving in the painting probably but by just dabbing my brush in here and there and rolling rolling it across the service and putting in these really strong little bits of orange it's killing all the milkiness very quickly so I just decided it liked the color and the easiest way to change that is just to go grab some pure color and just touch it here and there it's another huge advantage to work in wet and wet is you can alter the color so easily just go in there and add some blue to it red to it yellow whatever you want you just mix it right in you can change the color right on the canvas into any it to any degree you know if you're working on dry canvas with another color you pretty much have to paint that color on top but when you're working wet and wet you can take the the color and blend it into the the color that's already there and get a wonderful compromise you can also change things like I'm doing here with this grass if you look at the tip of that grass as it blended into the background it made a wonderful nice color well you're not going to get that if you're painting on top of dry paint you know I'm spoiled because my entire career I've always worked wet and wet and those few times when I have to work wet on dry you know I just notice how much harder it is but sometimes you have to you know like in this painting I didn't finish it I had to stop working on the still life and good do some other things that I had to do and the painting dried on me so when I painted the bottom half I had to work some wet paint into the dry paint and there's a way to do that but as far as being able to go in and really change things and play with things like I'm doing here by putting and I decided it needed a lot more red in the shadows so I just go and put it in and as you can see by just playing with it a little bit you can tone it down I want to put some more green back into it I can do that just as easily but I love working in wet paint like when I drag this brush into that background it just trails off perfectly and that's not going to happen if you're painting on top of dry paint so I'm just playing what's the difference and just looking over at the still life and making changes I wasn't trying to strictly paint it exactly as I saw it but I always whenever I'm doing anything abstract I'm just trying to look for for ideas on how to do things and the reason that green works and the reason that that green I think maybe is pretty at least to me is because the rest of the colors are so muddy and that's why I'm always talk about painting a muddy foundation instead of a bright colorful foundation because you can it's always a lot easier to add color as you've seen saying how I've done in this still life we can just especially when you're working wet and wet it's almost sometimes better to mix your color in as you go because you end up with interesting accidents you can always look over at your subject and decide how the color should change now on this background I told you I didn't like it and so I'm making some changes I went from trying to make it look like fabric to trying to make it look like and as what carved wood some kind of a who knows I was just started thinking I was creative and which I often do and sometimes you end up coming up with something interesting but I might like the background as it is right now and wished I would have left it just like it is and that took me so little work to do but then I decided that I wanted to really try to make it look like the fabric that was hanging back there so I went back and changed the background even more it's working on the edge of the of the again trying to introduce the abstraction that's why I put that little dark mark on the upper seed pod I played with this background so much I was just never happy with it for whatever reason I might like it the way it looks now I don't know but the way it ended up who knows maybe that was the best that really I really honestly don't have can't tell you which one I think is best but I think anywhere in here there were several times or I think it was possibly just as good as I ended up with after working on it and working on it and working on it it felt like I maybe overworked it but I'll probably convince you that I overworked it and if I just had it in the museum you know the more I worked on it I started to you know I don't know it started to get more variation in color more dance of color you know you put enough mess into something and you end up having so much more depth of color just because you've been working on it so long and playing with it so long that you end up you know getting something interesting but who knows maybe that maybe it was best or I finally ended up with it but just never share myself for the real definition in these seed pods again as is the way the edge plays and that's why I do a lot of edge work creating those little you know sharp little points coming out this was some grass that I actually picked right out in front of my studio and so here's the the still life and I've removed the front the the grass laying on them on the table I decided I didn't want to include that in the composition and I just decided I didn't like it and now gone back I had to stop painting for about a week or more and came back and some of my paint has started to dry and so I went back and now what I'm doing is I'm rewetting rewetting and I'm also painting over that black line because I'm not going to paint the grass but I'm rewetting all the areas that I'm going to be blending into and so I'll mix a color that's real close it doesn't have to be perfectly exactly the same but I'm definitely want to rewetting when I do blend into it it has a nice some nice color and in a nice blend line and not some sharp edge so here I'm using my finger to mix that wet paint on top of that dry paint and it might look a little flat now but all that will come back at when I varnish it where I rubbed with my finger there's a little bit of flatness but the varnish will bring it back it's putting a little fold in on the table again you can see the advantage of wet and wet if I had to do this on a dry you know painting this on top of a dry paint out of stone oh how I'd do it and notice these colors will look very different while there's still some of that stain color showing through but once I get the whole canvas covered the colors will start to look right at least to your eye now watch I do this what I've done is I've put it I just painted the whole thing a solid and now in order to maintain all the abstraction I'm rolling my brush if I tried to paint this pattern I could work at it forever and never make it as abstract as that as this ends up being and it's simply because I'm rolling my brush some kind of crazy way not even thinking about what I'm doing then I end up with a real nice beautiful abstract pattern and it took me no time to do that some of that's back the canvas showing through the stain showing through when I was rolling my brush that's another thing I do is all you know drive my bristles my bristle tips through the paint to reveal the the canvas and get a little bit of a of the stain color into it if that's what I'm trying to do so now I've just got to join those two areas together and as you can see I've never sent it up I've already wet that upper part if I tried to do that on top of a dry paint I just couldn't do it but it's real easy to blend and I definitely don't want to over blend see how I pick up my brush and then set it back down that's because I don't want this nice smooth perfect I want a little bit of noise in there this is the highlight of the table out there in the front this is actually catching some of my studio light but that was by design so that front edge of the table is a good step brighter changing some of the color in the back edge there and calling it done assigning it like I usually try to do with the tip of my brush and here's a shot of the finished painting and a detail shot of the tabletop and detail of the grass and background and then back to the overall shot of the completed still life if you're interested in finding out more about the oil colors that I use to paint the still life with go to Geneva fine art com and you can find out more about the oil colors that I use to paint this still life you

Channel: Draw Mix Paint

Views: 150,571

Rating: 4.94981 out of 5

Keywords: mark carder, carder method, oil painting techniques, oil painting lesson, oil painting tutorial, oil painting class, painting techniques, painting lesson, painting tutorial, painting class, 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, drawing, alla prima, sargent, paint, painting, paintings, painting demo, abstract, abstraction, bob ross

Id: psxfRL83Gvw

Length: 43min 4sec (2584 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2016