Portrait painting demonstration - Ewan McClure and Michael Samson

hello folks and welcome to the special edition of uh what do artists do all day or uh how do artists make ends meet um we've got my friend June McClure uh Ewan and I were at art school together and he's going to be showing us today some of his portrait techniques and we also have today A beautiful model and so we'll see if we can make a real mess of what we do with that right yeah so first of all you're going to show us uh how you lay out the palette yes yes I tend to think of a checklist before I even brush to Canvas just obvious things like making sure the canvas is enough light the subject's in enough light often we'll think more about the lighting on the subject and forget all about whether or not the canvases for people to get a whole tunnel range on canvas so it's got spotlights on both um and yes I'll just show you the palette wait so this is just my usual palette of a deep Crimson a mid-tone red a yellow I usually use Windsor red Windsor yellow green ultramarine blue occasionally have bird umber on the palette I'm using part number today Ivory black and white and in preparation for the portrait of mixed some piles of mud just some pills of flesh tone I tend to think of flesh tone as being orange and gray just a gray down shades of orange so this is actually black and white plus the red and yellow and different shades from dark to light um now obviously these are very dulled down and I'll brighten them up with with more color adding as I go but um yeah we tend to use overly bright colors I would say for fresh even though it's within the within a fairly limited range of hue so but I don't always do this this is just this I thought this would speed the process on a bit and as you see I've got huge piles of paint I think you shouldn't shouldn't skimp on the paint because you don't want to be squeezing out tubes of paint during the process I should just have it to hand so you and I are going to be doing a painting together and he's going to be teaching me or trying to teach me um and we'll see what we come up with so we'll let you and just lead us through well one thing I've done is just apply if any thin layer of lazy dial to Canvas again it's not something I always do but it just saves a bit of time getting that fresh layer of paint on that lubricates the surface and allows me to block in Kill the white block in as much as possible um you should see as well and you're working in oils and I'm going to be working in acrylics so between the two of us you can figure out really um the differences between the two medium what I'll do is use a flow improver uh gel retirement to kind of do the same job as the Lindsay dot yeah it's actually keep it open for a bit longer keep it workable in the same way as the oil does [Music] neutral color I'm seeing to um to the left of Allison's hand is there's the wall over there with the shelves and just averaging it out so sort of mentoring brownie green thanks okay maybe quite so close to the model as well yes I'm thinking in terms of the site size that is painting the head besides I'm seeing it and the way to achievement is to have the canvas alongside the subject and so I'm just going to be measuring horizontally across making sure the head fits on on the canvas nicely and yeah getting my vertical coordinates and measuring directly across if if I hit the canvas I mean if I had the easel closer to me over here and try painting site signs I'd be painting a tiny little head because from a distance ahead much much smaller so to get something approaching life size I like to have the easel next to the center and I'm making all my decisions from a good couple of pieces back so I can see the subject and the painting from a few pieces back okay and then I'll step forward make the marks and then step back and see if they're more or less on target in terms of placing um well setting up a composition placing it on the canvas do you have a predetermined idea in mind or do you envisage it but [Music] um yes it's good to think in terms of how the head occupies the space I need further reversible the sort of formula of a virtual format Works things it doesn't necessarily for the subject in this case I would like to include the head and the front of the chest there the neckline and so I think this this formula will work well whether or not to have her off center the convention would be to have her because I'm seeing I'm getting this side of the head the convection would be to have a off center to the right so that she's looking into the space it just feels psychologically more comfortable with them and if the direction of gaze occupies the space here then again the other consideration is the balance and the weight of the head kind of want it to be fairly versatile and fairly Central and just so the whole thing has a pleasing sense of weight on both sides now if a website drop saying off center I'd want to find some other way to balance it up and it might be that something in the background prevents that balance and I think yeah I think she'll I think I'll have you more or less Central though the symmetry of having the hair dead center is somehow broken manufactured contributes so it's not as if it's just going to be a mirror image on both sides anyway let's see I need to get more down before I can start playing Spot the Difference you see the Hearth on the right there quite like this it's just another coordinate to measure things against that's interesting yeah I'm playing that because I'm using the bigger canvas which is all I could get my hands on on the way of the door this morning um the size scene thing you're talking about I'm struggling with that now because I'm feeling like I have to make it bigger so it says well I mean you could work site size you could actually put the easel behind Allison but keep stepping back to this point and keep trying to measure across because you're almost in life size yeah it will be larger than life if you had it far enough back um if you want to do a larger life head then um yes or a quick push I do tend to work on a fairly small scale and a good idea yeah I do think whenever you find yourself scaling up that is making it well adding another layer of complication um which is quite tricky but I'm suggesting the site-sized thing um to make it as simple as possible you've always got a very clear reference from one to the other side but it might be an opportunity for you to use the canvas on the side to use the horizontal format it's entire life to you yeah you know that sounds like fun I don't know it's really easy just to take the line of that yeah yeah although I I would argue um to to do that from from a couple of pieces back make all your judgments from them so it might be the exactly the same position but yeah because it's on the eye level it is I think but you're right yeah so I'm not actually looking at houses when I'm at the canvas and get canvas rubbing in in the brush layer and then I step back foreign [Music] together and you'd ask me to try out your fuzzy glasses um you invented yes and it was still life that you'd set up and so I did this painting it was still life for the glasses on and changed down in the layers and then she took them off touched in the detail and I was really happy with it at the end and Ewing came up and said uh do I just make a few changes okay completely repainted I'm ashamed of this I think I broke the cardinal rule of any teaching you don't touch the other person's painting but you're a very obliged you said okay go ahead and I got into it and it was a much better painting at the end we thought it was your first attempt with the fuzzy sticks and I don't know if anyone apart from me would enjoy having the vision blurred and the specs are basically just spec frames with plastic um film that happens to blur what I'm seeing is what I'm seeing you've got the Zone just like yeah yeah I I do I do still use it for Dave's time no okay well I'm gonna take off my glasses then and I'll try and do it without my glasses on yeah see how you find it because you really shouldn't be caught up in extraneous detail initially I don't want to be seeing eyebrows eyelashes I just want to see a big mass of Taunton and touch the colors and general terms instantly it feels better actually blocks of tools it's a very painterly way of seeing I got the idea really about artists later in life who are producing the best work and whose eyesight was somehow on the way in um I think just like Digger and petition definitely producing their best work when they didn't have such sharp eyesight they were seeing things more broadly and brushed and flew more expressively yeah so no excuses about having bad eyesight definitely notice that it's a virtue to me an advantage I was thinking about the covering on the canvas to begin with as well and I was doing a slow drying medium and it creates like you would say a kind of a greasy surface to work on which keeps everything much more fluid particularly with the acrylics tendency to dry out quickly I'm gonna fight against as well I think whenever you're doing a demonstration painting there's always a tendency to want to do it slickly and to fight against that that feeling of making it up yeah you've got to try and keep looking be honest all the more so and even just stopping and looking because for this audience working with being the breath you think they want you to do something impressive but actually it's just as interesting watching someone take their time and make a decision but it's not rushed I'd struggle yes absolutely helps me it's a reassuring to see someone who's done this millions of times actually struggling I think so it's true I guess the point there is no real formula to painting and you can have a process that helps but this kind of formulaic approach and I think always produces something that's a bit false it can do it can do what kind of a formula but if your head's different in every setup it's different and one of those are likely to trip you up and make you not see truly what's there better to be a bit um or just some sort of workman-like approach what am I actually seeing constantly asking yourself what's actually there yeah it has a shape okay so look at what you're doing there you start to Define some of the shapes a bit more a little a little more [Music] um I mean there comes a point when you're no longer following a system there's more case of being Guided by what catches your eye and it's the upper plane of the forehead actually from my eye I wanted to get that down um yeah and see how that tone compares to other parts of the face that's what attracted me to Alison in the first place the upper plate of the forehead is that right other stuff I'm all for that [Music] bring your mixing colors are you thinking in terms of warmth at all coolness warm definitely warm cool um and well it's all the donations of color are light and dark and intensity and dullness and but it's when you've got something on the canvas that you can compare it to the subject and decide actually it needs to be a bit cooler or a bit more color in there it's not necessarily getting it right on the palette um so you definitely need the confidence to be able to put one stroke on top of another work wet and wet um rather than the name of this tends to the business of having to mix it correctly on the palette so I'm mixing a lot on canvas yeah there's a brushes here there's any particular brushes your favorite flat or round or fabric [Music] and I like to have all all types of hand I suppose I'm mainly using filbert at the moment and big ones at that um just for quick coverage nice big brushes do you think anyone who just is so used to using tiny brushes don't know what they're missing or Jeff brought to try bigger brushes more paint um is a lot of purchases are like like Guthrie and so on and I suppose keep a flat brush that we get the Chisel like hedges that can be very stylized though I think well it kind of people it can I mean it's great for finding your way around the Farms um but unless you're still prepared to soften edges here and there it can look like a manner it's a mannerism um The Village worthy I think it's called yeah fantastic portraits and it gives the first impression of being chiseled light brush strokes and quite strongly painted but it's very delicate and I think pretty much every brush stroke has been in some way augmented or softened so there's no really hard edges harder hard Edge brush stroke reads us flat and yeah that's all this has real form and volume thank you now if it's you know what I'm thinking of the background puzzle is chisel brush to it but when you get into the face he's got like kind of gradual change into much more organic soft well he is still seeing it in the middle units of a single brush stroke at a time but it is softened and um there's definite modeling [Music] um I've raced into that blue I maybe shouldn't it's a bit distracting I think I mean they totally initially um so I think that's whether it's lighter or darker than the skin yeah color I think does that isn't it color can be a real distraction I think Trump yeah it probably jumps out at you a red one I'll just saying color is easy tone is hard get the tone down first and then yeah and think about the color I don't necessarily think color is easy but um is with my fuzzy specs I really haven't seen things in a blurry way and I really do not have the desire to see things more detailed like where's the nostril but I think I'm going to stick to being the fuzzy specs and just painting what I'm seeing um getting these marks and more or less the right place it feels that the painting paints itself if you get them in the right paper size 100 points trying to be changed brush size at all you know I'm still working with a bigger brush that makes food okay pretty hefty not bigger than you I mean not as big as yourself [Music] yeah I've never made the quality when you're sitting Allison you know there's any difference between what I'm doing and what do you understand what's this stepping back more yes okay it's interesting I wonder he's also making marks before you make somewhere oh yes what's that yeah do gesture credit on the McDonald's rehearsal in the market before I put it down unconscious but um positive visualization yeah yeah there's a lot of waggling Imagining the mark in fact if you can come to the point where you're seeing the subject I'm thinking in terms of just paint um forgetting that it's skin and fabric and actually seeing that as paint I think this was a William minute Chase suggestion just see who the subject is painted and then um you'll find your way forward because it's gonna be quite inhibiting thinking so how do you paint skin and how do you paint hair but then you yeah you know it can actually be oil paints I mean you know the oil paint can do all these things I think when and I know that often when students are painting water clouds metal is another one yeah yeah how do you paint when plants but it's just the good shape is it for the color and it's going to break it down to the visual elements exactly from there and it's magic and it just happens it does it does I do think in terms of horizontal and vertical coordinates a lot and it doesn't sound very RT but um when you're yeah it's dropping up online or taking a horizontal across is it relating it was so important at some point and you're getting all your horizontals from the actual head the fact that it does line up not from your point of view but from that I understand you and the verticals as soon as you've got a mark yeah so anchor a point let's see what's directly below that to see for the um but here Falls and everything just keep dropping these lines down here you just keep talking while I'm racing it okay not as any competition seldom I think that I just get an opportunity to be in competitions it's true it's true I'd love to do more often than yeah it does push you on there's something about having somebody else there forces you to keep working and thinking yeah yeah coffee no you can if you like go ahead I think I checked Facebook so I'm not using a black potentially in this instance it's probably inhibiting man I'm trying to mix my grave with an old Humber and ultramarine it doesn't actually that should be fine um I'm pushing it too much one way or the other thanks a Whistler thought Ivory black was the great harmonizer and he actually had a touch of ivory black to all the colors on the palette so much for black being forbidden um black because it does contaminate the spectral colors in a way um again Sergeant I said you couldn't paint a portrait without black on the palette it's just it neutralizes everything which is useful it is very useful I think when people are just beginning to play around with paints they they go wrong with black when they hope they can just darken every color with it and also have a look natural and try darkening yellow with black and you get a very strong green and uh or an orange to try darkening orange and black and greeny as well I remember seeing a great William mctire landscape and painted a Twilight and for a distance it just the entire canvas looked gray and gray it just completely blacked out almost and you got a close and there was these rich Reds and greens and purples and vinyl just beautiful colors wow and but it was a tremendous amount of black mixed in each of the colors and they just subdued everything yeah yeah yeah it's quite exciting when you spot that and you realize you can get away with doing things which are against the rules is and do you check your painting with a mirror as you're working as a general rule you have no idea but I know it's a technique because yeah definitely useful for portraiture and yeah figure bye seeing the subject in the painting flipped around a bitiously eyes so you show us what you're doing there yeah bouncing against my picture okay I'm looking at my left eye I don't know if you can see that on the camera but you have a girlfriend I mean I'm doing it doesn't quite it doesn't matter to do it with a side like that or so that you can see the painting and the sitter yeah both flipped in the mirror so I put it there and look with my left eye you might want to stand a bit further back until you can both come into view got it got it yeah it's covered in oil thing oh yeah but it just tends to be even inaccuracy has pop out at you that you may have become in year two um at such an early stage probably everything's still very provisional but when you're getting closer to the end yeah you think it's getting there and then something notice oh behind the two-way in space or something like that yeah and okay I've made a face too chubby that's going to be about aha right your particular favorites that you've painted people you've painted was a particular shape or face or I tend to find I think this General will find Fairless easier and yeah just I don't know the early stages of a painting tend to look somewhat masculine just broad brush Strokes strong forms and that can be a little unflattering of the feminine physionomy tend to worry about letting a woman sitter see a portrait halfway done because it can be a bit tough looking because I feel like it likes looking tough not to generalize too much Alice is Pretty Tough catching the real hair foreign [Music] um quite a well-known fee it's obviously in classical music circles and so we had to live with them in our Conservatory for months and months now we keep going back to it and change a little bit and like but I find that again quite a critical approach and what I would do is um photograph my painting and open it on the computer screen alongside oh yeah or several photographs I was working from and sit with a coffee or whatever and make um decisions based you know just a few little things just you know the distance here is a millimeter too long and the angle there needs changed or an edge needs softened and then we'll go back and make those changes almost blind without making any other changes right and photograph it again and just follow the same process often sort of uh rotate it how about upside down yeah yeah yeah and it goes but the process seemed very critical um so at the end I had to go back and I think and liven up some of the brush Strokes give it a bit more fluidity more pain to limit yeah yeah there's always this battle between what you expect a painting to be like what you feel like doing natural painting I mean there's a romantic side splashing paint around and the fact that it is pretty technical just it is very busy but and I have been doing projects from from photos I I end up doing that kind of thing more than I would paint it from life and I do prefer the slightly more unpredictable nature of painted from Life um I mean you've got unlimited time got a photo in front of you you're not measuring too much yeah I mean I don't know there's just no end point until you've got like a photo I think I saw your final painting though you did manage to steer food of that Pitfall it did look like a lively painting um but yeah you can get rather that's true yeah it took a lot of I said work at the end getting a bit of life back into it because the initial underpainting I was really happy with that tonal Underpants didn't start with and I thought oh that's great you know really it's a bit of life to it and then I started to introduce the color and that's where all about clinical mm-hmm all right so we're starting again and we decided to introduce um a little bit Prosecco just to see if that helps the process this is a work in progress right and I've got my glasses on there as soon as I put my glasses on first thing I noticed was she looks like a robot very angular everything what about the painting [Laughter] right trying to soften some of this up we'll see how we go yeah I think all the great Porsche just slaughtered to some extent they're actually sure Sergeant did make his um women sitters look younger and all the rest of it make us males look stronger so it has to be a model but then we're a good day or a good lighting well that's right just using yeah the lighting's a lot of it um no no clearly no I do I do find it really tricky though I mean I've had sitters who almost want me to perform plastic surgery and this really goes against the brain because I think all faces are interesting in this instance it was someone who ruled good I mean uh um why why does such a happen to have insecurities I have no idea um so I did it's very hard to constrict when you're trying to reinvent nature people looking about so what are you thinking about at this stage aren't you I'm still thinking about obvious portion issues and um yeah I mentioned something earlier but if you make a mistake you don't necessarily need to panic and tackle it immediately uh given and some Partridge stronger jobs in fact it's a masculine mandible there um but hey and if I worried about them looking I said no I would probably start changing it but I do want to just keep shuffling around shuffling around the forearms and decide exactly what needs to change um I mean it's almost like I know that's wrong I'll be easy enough to fix that so I look forward to getting around to that but I don't need to attend to it immediately yeah I think there is always that as you say Rush particularly people are looking yeah yeah I love that it's that fear that they're thinking something they're thinking why is he why isn't like that wrong yeah and then you want to have one of them I noticed it a lot in the class I think because people are conscious that there'll be other people coming in and looking at them not to quickly get it right definitely definitely if we can hold off on that you're right so aha I said that I'm falling into that traffic yeah well how did you find it I should have asked you more about this how did you find out on the on the ground testing on the program painting alongside the other artists I was probably less aware of them than other stuff going on around about behind me and the camera and then yeah cameraman getting right in front of you to film you and I felt from your neighbors oh you told us to ignore them uh we weren't given any coaching whatsoever um yeah I mean that was fairly obvious that you should just try and ignore them but um didn't really tell you what they were about to do a production crudeness they knew all that much about but wasn't drinking a portrait and so they maybe didn't know they were being distracting horribly horribly distracting I see questions two minutes before change running okay so that's us back after uh Knight's rest and uh we're just looking to to try and tidy things up you and come on amazingly well and I've come in this morning and been a bit disappointed nonsense nonsense so um really this morning it's just about obsessing uh last minute things what are you going to do with usually hey as soon as when I started still just looking at proportions and um I still don't feel quite captured the simple blocky structure of this little blocky structure about things such poetic words so um it's just one of those things you just keep going back just reassessing and um you know when you see it when things click um hopefully that will be in the very well after that happen soon and you're right it's just doing it a lot yeah building that confidence and yeah and proportionally as well I've noticed in so many letters in mind that um if I had spent more time at the beginning doing that it probably would have come together there's this tiny little bits right oh no that needs to be longer oh that needs to be wider it's dark me man yeah I mean I'm doing all the wrong things sometimes I'm just trying to move things by a millimeter but I think when you when you do find yourself wondering if just shifting my military that might be the time to reach for a big brush again and then the general structure again I mean I'm I'm going back and forth and back and forth but you're right I think you could continue painting for weeks on end on the same thing um I never really get me anywhere just spinning around in circles um it comes a point just to stop for me that's not soon by the way let me move it up a little bit now that's perfect what is this right okay we also trying yeah um what's this okay well this allows should see more tonally um seen painting on the subject as a so you're looking at both oh my goodness yeah so just eliminates the combination of color and helps you see whether or not you're on target with the tones let's just put that in front of the camera because that's what we're seeing it's like a red version of a black and white photo so you can really just see the structure and you get to see I think the tonal relationships don't you so you're looking for the darks and the lights yeah yeah and how they um the only problem is everything you own is covered in us I wonder why that is filthy juicy person uh cameras will that work the reducing glass is an interesting one as well that reduces the paintings and the sitter to Something's a bit smaller so you can see a condensed version of the image yeah too many people work right up close and they don't see the whole picture of it when you step back or use a reducing glass that compresses and can we try your glasses as well up at the uh yeah what have we got I mean these really are fingerprinty but um see it becomes an impressionistic mist of color and then you add the detail that's great [Music] here you're really wanting to work out from working yeah well thank you very much model thank you you and that was absolutely fantastic I've learned an awful lot

Channel: Michael Samson

Views: 71,583

Keywords: Painting, Portrait, Oils, Acrylics, Scottish artists

Id: OiUCUUD_eOc

Length: 69min 4sec (4144 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 23 2016