The PAINTING Exercise That Will HELP You the MOST

okay so in this video i'm going to be going over one of my favorite painting exercises where you are forced to use a limited number of brush strokes this exercise will help you so much in a lot of different aspects of your painting which i'm going to go over in this video i'm going to talk how it helps your simplification skills you're going to better understand the planes of an object it will help give you more confident looking brush work it will help you not to blend your paint and it will get you more comfortable using thick paint okay if you're new to the channel then welcome to pain coach my name is chris fornitero and i'm here to help simplify oil painting so that you can get better faster so what is this exercise exactly well first thing is you're gonna have a limited number of brush strokes i recommend keeping it under 30 if you can i've seen some people try and do 25 20 or even 10. you're also going to want to do this on a very small canvas i just taped off a 9x12 panel into four sections but i wouldn't go bigger than six by six inches so what you're gonna do is you're gonna take a subject i recommend a still life something simple like an apple and you're gonna look at it and you're gonna squint your eyes and you're gonna get rid of detail and you're gonna simplify it simplify it into its big shapes and you're going to use the biggest brush that you can to paint this subject and as few brush strokes as possible this is going to mean that you're going to have to make sure that you're using enough paint because once you put a mark down that's it you can't go and fuss with that mark you can't blend it out you can't alter it you can only add on new marks so you're going to want to make sure you got enough paint loaded on your brush and ready to make a good confident mark so you're probably thinking like chris like why exactly am i doing this exercise exactly how is this going to help me and what if i don't want to paint in that kind of style what if i don't want to paint in a loose simplistic style if i want to paint very detailed well it's going to help no matter what style you have because what you're going to learn from it are the base core fundamentals of painting that are true no matter what your style and what this exercise is going to help you do it's going to help you be able to simplify a subject which is just one of the most important things with painting to be able to look at a subject and break it down to its most important shapes to really understand what is going on trust me if you can do this exercise and make your subject look good and read when you switch back to more regular painting you're gonna be a lot better you're gonna have a stronger understanding of what you're doing so major thing that it's going to teach you is about the planes of an object so what am i talking about when i'm saying the planes of an object whenever there's a change in direction on the surface of an object that creates a different plane even if it's something that seems perfectly round like an apple it's always best to understand it as if it wasn't perfectly smooth if it was like carved out of wood and they hadn't sanded down the edges yet because being able to identify the planes is going to help you be able to identify the light source and vice versa being able to identify the light source will also help you identify the planes all right take this lemon for example it's sitting on a red surface and you can see that that red light is reflecting onto the bottom of the yellow lemon because the lemon's yellow and the light bouncing up onto it is red it's looking more orange now you see that orange on that part of the lemon because that's the part of the lemon that's facing down towards the ground you don't see it on the middle of the lemon or the top of the lemon because the top element is facing up the middle the lemon is facing towards us so if you think of this lemon in terms of flat plains how each plane is being lit is going to make a lot more sense being able to correctly identify these planes is really going to help you sell the form of whatever it is that you're painting and also this doesn't just go for still lives like you could be painting a tree and you'd still be thinking about the planes when you're painting a portrait you're definitely thinking about the planes the planes of a face so don't just think that this exercise is just for improving your still life it's going to improve all of your work okay now let's talk about brushwork so a big part of being able to paint something simply or painterly and still have it look real is your brushwork you don't ever want to waste a brushstroke but what i like to do is i like to identify a shape and then cover that shape in as few brush strokes as possible and as the painting goes on i just identify smaller and smaller shapes but the process stays the same and again i find this process true even if you want to paint very tight very realistic paintings like i did a self-portrait here now from afar you'd look at this and say oh he painted very smooth and probably blended a lot of edges but a closer look will show that it's actually just comprised of a bunch of really small shapes no matter how small the shape got if i was using the number zero brush i'd still be thinking about my paint as if it was paper mache and i'm trying to wrap it around my subject having an economy of brush strokes will just add such a strong sense of confidence to your painting if you want examples of this taken to the max just take a look at john singer's sergeant's work this guy would paint locks of hair in like a few brush strokes or get the perfect highlight on someone's face with one brush stroke so in this exercise where your brush strokes are limited it's going to cause you to stop and really think about each stroke you know is this the best way to put it on should i hold my brush up like this should i hold it down should i pull it should i pull it down should i pull it up should i turn the brush on its side what's the most efficient way to cover this whole space without taking my brush off the canvas and before i forget you know this exercise isn't easy you're going to feel uncomfortable like that's the point of the exercise is to break out of your comfort zone and to change some of your habits and to get you to rethink how you look at painting so if you struggle with it or it's frustrating that's okay it's supposed to be one of the great things about this exercise is that it doesn't take much time to do like you can knock one of these out in 20 or 30 minutes so you can keep doing a lot of them until you get it now another great thing that this exercise is going to help you with is not blending i've made a whole video on not blending if you want more information on that i'll put a link to it somewhere above the screen right now i don't know where it's going to be but the great thing with this exercise is that when you put a brush stroke down you're forced to leave it there you can't go back in and fuss with it or blend it or anything like that you can only add on more brush strokes so if you have two different values next to each other and you want a softer transition to them you're gonna have to put down a transitional value in between them now another great thing about this exercise is it's going to force you to use thicker paint when you only can lay down a brush stroke one time you can't go back in and mess around with it because your brush strokes are limited it's going to cause you to be very cautious about how much paint is on your brush and making sure that you have enough so that when you make the stroke it's going to make the stroke that you want it to i feel like one of the most common problems i see with beginners is that they're just not using enough paint i feel like this stems from just being intimidated by oils in general and they feel like if they can just use a little bit at a time it's safer and it's really the exact opposite you want to be using a good amount of paint you're also going to want to make sure that you are using good oil painting brushes that are strong enough that they can pick up enough paint and lay down enough paint if you struggle with laying down thick enough paint or like chris like it always becomes mud or you know it mixes in with the other paint i can never do that i've made a whole video on that i feel like not a lot of people have seen this video i don't know if the algorithm messed with or whatever but i feel like it's the i feel like that's the most asked question i get is about being able to just paint and layer it and make it do what you want to do so i'll put a link to that video somewhere above me right now now like i said before these won't take that long you know 20 to 30 minutes actually if you struggle a lot with this exercise it's like really difficult another exercise you can do that's similar to this is painting the same thing but only giving yourself 20 minutes to do it it's gonna cause you to cover more area quickly to make big bold decisions and that's what we're looking for here and honestly because these things don't take that long they become addictive and i actually did a lot more than i thought i would do and i do the same one a few times because every time i feel like oh i think i can get it better i think i can get it better and it almost becomes like a little game like a puzzle and you're trying to figure out like the best way to go maybe if i i took this brushstroke and did it more like this this time that'd be better and then this and that so it can get really fun you know don't think of it like an extra oh i got it i have to do this like enjoy it it's a fun exercise have some fun so do this exercise i promise it will help it might be very frustrating it might be very hard you might have to do it a whole bunch of times before you get something you like but i promise you it will make you better now while watching this video if you like chris i'd love to do all this but i just really struggle at mixing color what should i do well i can give you access to the color mixing video of my foundations of oil painting course for free i'll put a link to where you can go watch that video it will help you understand the basis of color mixing and the color wheel if you want to just jump on in and do the whole course i'll put a link to where you can go straight to the course down there as well also down there is a link to my patreon page where actually have a full length video of me doing this exercise and if you want to see what i'm painting on a daily basis you can follow me on instagram at forza43 i'm chris hornatero here telling you to go get painting you

Channel: Paint Coach

Views: 91,969

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Id: DSeA1xEaV6I

Length: 9min 42sec (582 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 22 2021