The Secret to Developing Your Own Oil Painting Style

[Music] Oh hey repeaters welcome back to the studio the lights are on coffee is always hot and the paint's are ready to go and we're going to be talking about how to find your style in painting but this is the the actual painting that I'm working on today this is the original photo that I took last March when I was out in kolob canyon at Zion National Park and still there was still snow on it so I am excited to be able to share this with you I'm gonna put the original photo up so if you want to try your hand at doing this particular photo you'll be able to to have it you didn't put your own particular vision on it so let's get started you'll notice that I decided to do this video like I did the sketching video and it's real time I didn't speed it up it's not time-lapse but that means the original painting took me about three hours so that means that I needed to cut out all the extra parts from a three hour painting down to about 20 minutes or so and it actually worked pretty well I was able to cut out a lot of the repetitive stuff and and the time that I spent mixing up colors such like but I started out as I always do with well at least on my sketches with just a very simple drawing and if I put something down and I don't like exactly how it looks then I take a little bit of turpentine on a rag and wipe it off and give it another try one of the things that I want to stress here again like I did in my sketching with style video is that I'm not doing an exact representation of what's there I'm trying to get catch the mood and the atmosphere of what's there but I am not afraid to move things around a little bit I actually made this spire just a little bit wider and the back Mountain I brought it up just a little bit as well and you'll see that I do that quite a bit throughout I simplify things and I I don't want necessarily to be a slave to what is exactly there that's one of the beautiful things about painting and not not photography is that you decide where you want everything to be if there's a tree that's in your way move it out of the way yeah you get to play get to play our version our humble version of God for a little bit and when I put these clouds in I don't put them in as a bright white and I I do manipulate the edges so I'll put it down and like there I'll cut out a little piece a little chunk the edges of clouds normally on one side or harder-edged than they are on let's say the bottom side now these happen to be rather wispy clouds and so that doesn't hold true like it would for let's say a cumulus cloud but you can really manipulate this a lot and I do until I feel like I've got the shape that I want and like I said before if I put something down and I don't like it and I feel like it's getting too muddled or too difficult to manipulate I'll just wipe it off and try again there's there's kind of an unwritten rule for me and that's that I never I never let anything on the canvas that I don't feel is the best that I can do and sometimes that's why it takes an awful long time in order to paint something but if you're going to be painting in your own style you need to not be a slave to what's there I will simplify and stylize so much of this Canyon that that you saw in the opening photo of the painting that I did it still will look like the canyon but I've changed a lot of it and I'll talk about that along the way but when you're painting clouds in remember to keep the edges soft on them they don't have to be bright white in fact other than maybe one or two little spots you don't want them to be super white and so you'll notice that as I go along here I'm softening edges I'm manipulating them so that I feel like they're not going to be competing I had a teacher one time tell me you should you should paint clouds like a duck can fly through them and that is something that always kind of echoes in my brain whenever I'm painting I don't want them to feel solid I want them to feel like water vapor just like they are so I think it's time to talk a little bit about painting the way you see things and when you do that you you have to reach this point where you feel like where you jump off from from the reference if you're constantly looking at exactly how the reference is then you're gonna end up with something that's very close to what's there you have to at some point in your painting career or your artistic life you have to be willing to put the reference away paint what you know or what you feel rather than what you're seeing I will be painting this spire this shadowed side of the of the mountain I'll be painting it cooler than what them what's there and I'll be making it a little bluer and a little bit a little more purple a little more colorful than what's there I don't ever want to be just a slave to what is in front of me particularly particularly when you're painting from a photograph I do try and stay closer to the colors whenever I'm painting on location because that's one of the reasons why I paint on location is to learn the rules of what light does and that's how colors interact with atmosphere so when I go out and I plant paint plein air it's different than what I'm kind of doing here in that I am being more of a slave to the values and to the temperatures of what I'm seeing but at the same time I will move things all over the place and in order to do that you have to have some brush mileage don't expect that you're going to be able to do that the first time that you go out and you paint on location or in plein air as they call it you need to learn the rules before you can break them and you know I've heard that adage quite a bit and there's probably not many places where it's more true than when you're you're painting on location and so I feel like I've done this enough now that I can go ahead and and shift things around and kind of put my calligraphy my brush work the way I intuitively want to put the paint down for so many years I just was a slave to what's the word just being very literal to what was there and at some point I found that I got much better I got much better results if I allowed myself or trusted myself enough to change things and and to give the different kind of strokes that felt right to me and that were unique to me but the only way to do that is by painting a lot or drawing a lot and you'll find certain certain shortcuts certain ways that you can describe a tree or a rock or clouds and you'll be able to do that much easier if you have a lot of experience in getting out and painting what's there at least four well it depends on how much you go out and do it but I'd say at least for a good year or two I do tell some of my students that when you go out and you start painting on location you need to figure that the first year that you're doing it you're just simply getting used to being out there because there's so much that's going on that is different from the studio and so let's just name a few things you have obviously changing lighting conditions not just the fact that the Sun is moving and you only have about an hour and a half or two hours to get it down but also the fact that let's say you start your painting and it's sunny and you get about 15 or 20 minutes in and the clouds roll in any plein air painter will tell you that this is going to happen and you have to learn how to handle it the best way I was ever taught and I found that works for me is you get out there and you find your shadow patterns you find the things that are in the shade you know the shadow side of the tree the the shadows that are thrown onto the ground the shadow side of a building and you put those in first you lock those in and so if you lock those in and you have clouds that go over then you don't have to worry about trying to remember what was there a shadow there or not you know exactly what's there and you can go on to painting other things that you know mid-tones that kind of thing until the cloud passes and you can go back and start painting your shadow shapes and your and your your shapes that are in the light as well so you know it's just a matter of getting those initial patterns in and then coming back to them later I would suggest for you when you start working in your brush calligraphy like like I am here you need to work so that your brush strokes go in the direction of what you're painting so that they describe you your plane or your planes the brushstrokes generally are following the shape of the spire you know that the mountain they're generally they'll follow the shape of a diagonal hillside and like I am doing now on the ground it's following the shape of the ground plane I like to describe it as though if it were raining what direction would the water be running off and that's generally the direction that I want my paint strokes to be to be following now you can't do that for every single stroke because it would just be way too boring but if you follow that rule as a generality then you're going to find that your paint describes what's there a good way to find your own voice is to be a student of those artists that have found their own voice and see how is it that they figured out that their brush calligraphy works William went is a good example of that Maynard Dixon another example of that Oh Edgar Payne Edgar Payne was a master of that there's a there's a painter who lives here in Prescott who is really making a name for himself and that's Bill Kramer Bill Kramer is kind of he's kind of a modern-day version of Edgar Payne he's got a wonderful sense he's very fast at what he does very sure and he has a painting style that looks like no one else who's painting now and the reason that he has that is he's done thousands of paintings so who are your favorite painters that to have a real unique style to them I'd love to hear some new names go ahead and put them down in the comment section I'll look them up there you go yeah right there's what I'm talking about as far as following the the plane and so I'm working horizontally in order to describe that ground plane that's there now in the original photo you'll notice that there is no open meadow like this but I felt like I didn't want this spire to just fall off the bottom of the painting I wanted something to catch your eye and the perfect way to do that is to put you put in a ground plane more of a foreground as you're painting you're going to start out with these generalized simple shapes it'll look way too simple but if you're doing it right that's that's how it will be and you go along and you're adding in the details as you go and you're adding the details in selectively there's an awful lot of stuff that's going on in this part of the photo or in this part of the hillside but if I was to paint it like that it sure would not be very attractive so I'm putting in little patterns that will help to make it look like there is some structure to it but at the same time I'll be going back in and adding some of that shrubbery that's in there I added along that dark edge along the bottom that helps to keep your your eye or your viewers eye from going off of the edge and so I started out I've got the shadows in and now I'm gonna be adding in more of the light side of some of these bushes and shrubs that are on the side of this mountain here and you'll notice I've got very different colors that's going on there you know you've got some very traditional greens I obviously you've got some of the ground plane showing through but you have these sage bushes which are more of the grays that I'm going to be working in here and you don't need any more than that you know that's plenty of different colors going on in there really at this point I'm not looking at the reference very much I know what I need to do and I'm trying to make it a painting rather than exactly what I see and so it kind of becomes intuitive you start painting with your intuition you step back and look you see where does this painting fall down where does it need some more structure where does it need some shadows and do that with that same brush application or paint application that you've done up till now and you'll be just fine I'm known throughout kind of the Western art community for doing my cowboy paintings and I used to joke in fact I still do sometimes that there's a cow and every single one of my paintings just sometimes they're just behind a bush sometimes they're behind the mountain and you can't really see them but I assure people that I've painted a cow and every single one of my paintings and there's one in this painting too so how do you make let's say bushes like or trees that are at the base of this mountain read like that what they are without actually painting the whole thing in and putting in a lot of detail well the way light works is top of the bush or tree is lighter than the bottom part so and there's usually three three values you've got the top plane you have the kind of the side plane and then you've got the shadow plane and if you put in your paints with that idea in mind with that shorthand then it's going to read like what you want it to read like and all I'm doing right along here is I'm going in and I'm I'm adding some of that top plane now it's it's not all exactly in the same place if if you have that top plane and you paint them so like it they're all in a row it's going to look really fake so you need to change it up a little bit your viewers eye needs that irregularity you need to have that top plane go a much farther down in some places and and have it just be a tiny little part on some other places where there's a transition like what I'm painting now from light to dark a lot of times you'll get this color saturations you'll notice that I'll put in pops of color almost a hundred percent vibrant colors right out of the tube like that red there is this stripe of red that goes along the spire that I put in and just left alone it's the only one that's on there and I like it I think it adds this little touch of interest and we're coming down towards the end at this point all I'm doing is I'm trying to see if there are places where there's interest missing I'm looking for edges that I can manipulate whether I make harder edges or softer ones and like I am in this area here I'm trying to break some of that strong horizontal line because your eye needs some irregularity of course the last thing you do and the most fun part is getting to sign your name and hopefully it works well enough that you want to sign your name and put sometimes you just put the painting in a corner and hope that you can come back and salvage it and sign it later and here's the photo and the painting side by side so you can compare what was there and what I ended up doing well I hope you found this helpful thank you for joining me today it's time to close up the studio let me know if you have any questions put them down in the comment section I always love answering those if you do me a favor let me know how you like this normal speed video rather than a time-lapse video do you have a preference so until I see you again as always I'll see you down the road [Music]

Channel: Steve Atkinson Fine Art

Views: 56,541

Keywords: fine art, oil painting, oil painting tutorial, oil painting demo, en plein air, plein air, plein air painting, plein air demo, steve atkinson, steve atkinson studio, draw paint repeat, art tutorial, painting tutorial, painting demo, painting demonstration

Id: f3x55i2ZpjU

Length: 21min 32sec (1292 seconds)

Published: Thu May 16 2019