Reasons NOT to Blend While Painting (and How to Break the Habit)

so I want to talk about blending and the importance of not blending until you have the canvas covered you know if you're painting an object you should paint the entire object and have all the canvas covered and all your color basically put in before you do any blending at all and I want to explain to you why that's so important and I also want to suggest to you an exercise that I think is something that you know I sort of came up with recently as a way to sort of force people to get beyond this this habit of over blending everything it's the number one thing that I see in my students even in students that are successful with my method and they're doing well the one thing that persists and the one thing that they can't seem to stop doing is over blending or over working you know whatever they're painting if you look at all the you know this is a matter of taste but in my opinion the great realist artists not any not one of them over blended there's always a if you get in there close you can see the brushwork you can see the the fact that they've put in one color in another color and it's not all smooth together you know it's even I have a video that I where I talk about painting ugly where if you get up close and you look at a Sargent painting if you look at the hair and this goes for any any realist artist that paints with it with a strong stroke there's nothing there it's ugly it doesn't look like hair when you get up close it doesn't look like porcelain if it's a teapot you know it doesn't look like what it is when you get up close it's sort of that magic trick where you're in a museum and you look at a beautiful painting and then you as you walk up close to it you realize it's just a bunch of jumbled brushwork and that's really the essence of the problem because when you're sitting there painting and trying to paint something and make it look real you want it to you want to be able to see it and the reality is is that when you're up close you don't see it as an artist you see brushwork you see you see a mess of paint and color and and you don't actually see the that the the tea cup or whatever it is and you want to see it so you overwork it and you fix it and you fix it and you fix it and you polish it up so that up close it still looks good to you but the reality is is these great paintings when you step back away from they look good but when you walk up close they fall apart and here'd is not hair and and lips are not lips they're just a dash of color and if you're sitting there painting it yourself and looking at that dash of color for lips you are real the temptation to go in there and smooth that up and fix it is is huge and it's something that's really really hard to overcome so let me I'm going to tell you about this exercise that I think will work for anybody if you're if you do it and you don't you know cheat if you follow these very simple rules and so what I propose that you do and this is something that doesn't need to be you need to stop thinking about what I what I want what I think you should do is to is to paint a single painting and it could be a still life from life it can be a you know you could work from a photograph if you do it should be a good photograph but let's say you do one painting let's let's just say it's a still life and you're going to work from life and or from a photograph but but I say I prefer life just because I know that there's so many poor quality photographs out there and if you work from life you know the colors are going to be fantastic and good and everything else plus a lot of times when you work from life it's easier to paint with a stronger stroke and when you work from a photograph and it's right in front of your face you tend to over paint the detail because you can see the detail so well but let's let's say that you're going to set up a still life and you're going to paint it and what I propose is the exercise is that you don't think about trying to do a pretty painting they just just throw that idea out the window and completely take that out of out of the equation so your goal is not to do a pretty painting it's not to paint a painting that you love not to even make it look real in fact I would say that the only rule that you need to follow is that your values need to be right and your colors need to be right that means that you're using your color checker and you're checking all your colors you're not guessing you're letting the color checker guide you but you're laying in your color and if you get all your values right and they don't have to be perfect but if you get your values more or less right if that finished painting is ugly and horrible and poorly painted and and and as you know and everybody hates it then you succeeded you get an A for the course as long as your values are right okay so in other words and in order to to do this exercise and score 100 so to speak you haven't blended a single stroke okay you've you've laid in your colors and even with the intention of saying you know what I want to paint a painting and I want all my values to be right and I want things to be more or less where they should be but they don't have to be perfect but more or less than you know I'm going to take my time and do the lines right it doesn't have to be perfect I'm going to lay in these splotches of color I'm going to put in several steps I'm not just going to put in a shadow and a highlight I'm going to put in you know four or five or six steps or even more many steps as you want but there won't be a single if you blend one stroke if you go in there and fix something by pushing it around and playing with it which is blending or by even blending because you think you think things don't look smooth and it looks jumbled and you want it to be like a smooth teapot you're just simply not allowed to do that the whole point of this exercise is to finish with a very ugly painting that you hate everything about but your values are right a and you haven't blended a single stroke so if you can get through that exercise and keep in mind that your goal is to make it as horrible as you can make it so long as your values are right and you're laying all your colors in basically where they need to go but you're not blending one bit so now let me see if I can explain to you why I think blending is something you should do at the very end and not something that you should do as you work which is what most people do if you're trying to judge your values or you're trying to judge whether or not your painting is working and and this is especially true if you're working wet and wet and that's you know what I teach with the draw mix paint method that I teach and if you're laying in your colors properly and your values are correct before you have your object finished it's going to look completely wrong to you unless you have a really well trained eye the values are going to look wrong the shadows are going to look wrong and you're going to be really tempted to go in there and fix it because what everybody does is they look at and I mean amateurs or people who aren't familiar with what I'm talking about with the no blending is is you you're always looking at your painting and you're saying how can I make this look better how can I fix this how can I make this look pretty to my eye you know a foot from your face or two feet from your face as opposed to how it's going to look at a room's length and even then it's hard to judge because of the artists curse because of this you know there's a lot of reasons but especially before you have the canvas covered you really can't make a judgement about your values and so that goes back to what I tell people and that is there's two very distinct modes and painting there's the the part where you're covering the canvas where you're laying in your values and you're doing it based on color checking or you know you're using a proportional divider even to get your lines right and your in your colors but when you do that when you lay in your colors and you start to put something in and it's not finished it's going to look wrong to you and you really have to trust the color checker and you have to trust you know when you when you fill up your brush with color you've done it because you've checked the color with the color checker you've moved it around you've said how far to the left does this go how far to the right how far up and you you know do your research so to speak with the color checker then you paint that color exactly where you see it on the canvas and when you do that and when you lay these colors in one on top of another not blending together not fixing not playing on your canvas but literally just laying in the splotches of color in any old way you want and it's just amazing what you can get away with I mean it doesn't matter what sort of brushwork you have it doesn't have to even look like sergeant's you can go out there and find all kinds of different brushwork but the common denominator to all of those is that the color is not all smooth together into this sort of monochromatic smooth wash of color or lack of color there's always a texture to it and that's the ability to paint and to leave it alone and so that's what this method is all about so let me go back to the two distinct modes of painting so as you lay in your color and as you cover the canvas of the object you're painting you're trusting the color checker and you're kind of doing it blindly and you're not allowing yourself to make a judgment about whether something looks right or wrong but once the canvas is covered then you have the ability to see whether things look different and you can decide is my shadow too dark or is my shadow too light and you don't even have to be a trained artist to see it you know you can be painting your very first painting and once you get all the values put in and it's and that's that's the the important thing is that you've covered the canvas and then I if I sit you down and I ask you and I say do you see how your shadow is lighter color or lighter value than then the still life and you'll be able to see it and you can you can see it and if I say do you see how the the reflection is more subtle in the still life and how in yours it's more it's too big and you can see it but it takes having that canvas covered where you're in a position where your eyes can see and you can make those judgments and so there's a real distinct difference between Lane in your color covering the canvas and then once the canvas is covered and this is really just for that object that you're painting with a little bit of background around it which is real important then you have the ability to make judgments about value but not until then so so that goes this all goes back to the importance of not blending getting your colors put in painting the whole object and then at that point if you want to blend and you want to smooth things out you can do it but even then I encourage you to you know go look at you know John Singer Sargent or repens work and notice how they really always to a certain degree and sometimes in the extreme left things unblended if you go to draw mix paint calm you can find links to all my free videos if you go to geneva fine art calm you can find out all about the paint that i use to paint with that I manufacture myself right here in Austin Texas and thank you so much for watching you

Channel: Draw Mix Paint

Views: 834,882

Rating: 4.919488 out of 5

Keywords: mark carder, carder method, oil painting techniques, 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, alla prima, sargent, paint, painting, paintings, painting demo, mix paint, mix color, mix pigment, mixing color, mixing paint, mixing pigment, color theory, color wheel, color paint, color painting, oil paint, pigment, blending, blending paint

Id: Q0Qbw7Wlsgc

Length: 12min 49sec (769 seconds)

Published: Wed May 04 2016