The Twelve Keys to Create Great Paintings -What Every Artist Should Know

[Music] I'm Stephan Baumann I would like to invite you on a special journey to discover the splendor encounter the grand jury feel the excitement [Music] come along with me experience that thriller painting outdoors [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] a three-day journey that will change your art forever in one of America's most stunning locations Mount Shasta everything you need to know is on our website WWF in Belmont calm [Music] these are the 12 keys to painting now there are 12 keys to plein air painting so this is called 12 keys to plein air painting but you could adopt these twelve keys to be as part of any painting and there's probably more keys out there and depending on the instructor they probably would add a few more some instructors will probably disagree but these are my twelve keys the first thing that you have to have before you even start as a concept number one if I pause for a second it's probably one of the keys now remember there's gonna there's twelve keys so I will be pausing 12 times to give you enough time to write down another key when you come up onto something and you wanted to paint it you have to ask yourself is it worth painting and a lot of times you'll answer no no no and we get into that that Moses syndrome that Moses syndrome is when you're looking around for the promised land where you're expecting anything to happen and what you want to do is you want to become an artist that basically can just drop out of the sky somewhere and be able to paint it so my my philosophy is that you find a scene and then come up with a concept and the concept that you come up with has to be really clear and vivid like I said you have no business starting to paint if you don't envision what it is that you're painting and you have no business starting to start a painting unless you can isolate what the central focal point is it's so like with Lisa's painting yesterday or when we were doing the barn out there she's like yeah but where's this such a focal point I said well you have to envision that you'll have to put that in and then you have to have vision the whole painting done and in a frame if you can kind of envision the finished product as it would appear done by your hands hanging in a house in a beautiful frame then you're ready to begin so the first part of your painting is that you need to just sit still for a minute and absorb and ask yourself where is my central focal point are there any eye magnets does is my viewer leading in to it this is just a good idea and we can turn anything into I mean I have my students I tell them well turn over a pot a trash can and the trash fall out and sit in front of it and come up with a painting and if you know the rest of this stuff and the central focal point stuff you could turn trash into beautiful paintings and I've had students work with you know I give them a concept of bubble wrap say do a painting with bubble wrap come up with a concept how would you come up with that and at you so that's a really important part at the beginning you shouldn't even start and then when you're looking at the concept the second thing that's most important in a painting is a central focal point out of everything that you look at you must have a central focal point to start and we spent all weekend talking about a central focal point I've been pounding it into your heads but really that's how we see when somebody walks up to you you look at their eyes if they have no eyes you'll be looking for any other kind of clue but you the brain wants resolve they want to know why is it that I'm looking at this painting and if you don't direct the viewer to a central focal point and say hey hey look at this the painting falls short and when paintings fall short they start looking sloppy they start looking disorganized they start but once used to get a central focal point in the painting you can take chaos and land it all together by putting in it together and make a central focal point so there are a lot of artists that don't sit and follow all of the rules of an l-shape a v-shape you know all the alphabets in fact you said does this classify as an l-shape I said don't worry about the alphabet because what happens is that you'll be for what we were cavemen we put together composition and we had no idea whether an alphabet was so artists say we'll look for an L look for thee look for a why do an M to a C to an a m yes you're trying to figure out what does that spell YMCA yes so you want to have a central focal point so the central focal plane is saying this is what this painting is about and usually the central focal point should be something that is not a thing central focal points are not things there are effects so this painting is about essential focal point of a lightening effect on something so Lisa again back to that wall how are you going to put light on there now when there is no central focal point you choose one you don't decide on one when I walk two people I said watch your set your focal points they go well it could be this but I'm kind of I'm kind of leaning towards that you're trying to decide what your central focal point is and decide fall is in the same language family as homicide suicide pesticide it means to kill off options so you're deciding and there's no power in deciding you choose one I want my central focal point to be the highlight on that barn and if once you choose that everything else is based around that and you don't reach OU's now God might sit there and go but yet look at the light over here and you go thank you for sharing but I've already made my choice if you were deciding your central focal point that's a good idea to know you choose it and you stick with it third thing that you need to know that's important to know what you have to kind of consider is the composition of it so you want to break your composition up into thirds the law of thirds you want to have a foreground middle ground background why do you want those because they work you don't want a foreground and in the background you don't want to have a middle ground and a background you want a sense of place in order to create a sense of place you have to create a foreground that's substantial enough so that the viewer feels like they're standing somewhere the central place is crucial when putting together composition and yet a lot of artists don't give it any consideration but if you go into the museum's and you look at great plein air paintings like Monet and MANET you look at their really great paintings of beer stud and and Sargent and landscape painters they all give you a sense of place there's always a foreground even Sargent if you're in a boat looking in Venice he'll actually put the front of the boat in so the viewer feels like they're in a boat they don't want to have the person feel like they're standing in water it's uncomfortable people paint Grand Canyon scenes and you think you're floating in a hot-air balloon or you're on your way falling down like oh the last minute like wow that's a pretty job knowing how to break a composition up into thirds and then knowing where that central focal point will go in those serves is crucial so the next thing is our values temperature isn't values and value isn't temperature now most artists will say values the most important thing you can know and if you watch a lot of YouTube videos of artists they're just basically carrying on the torch light that their teachers gave them and they said values are the most important thing until you learn temperatures and what you learn temperatures you can no longer talk about values unless you understand the temperature of that value so I would say temperatures are more important than values but both of them are equally important and that's what you know that's where we were in this workshop I mean imagine this whole workshop we just hung out in number 4 Wow can you imagine if you had a workshop on all 12 of these you'd have to get franca fly or Mouse to come from Canada okay or a house yeah house here so anyway so so learning the temperature of things learning the temperature of light and shadow learning the values of darkness and lightness you could take all of the color out of a painting and still be able to tell what it is so many people go to painting because they think color is the most important thing and color doesn't even really apply you could paint a painting absent of color or you can actually change all the colors and it would still work there are a lot of artists that paint in bizarre covector the the guy that paints the blue dogs you know he'll paint all these dogs blue it's like there's no such things as a blue dog kind of a gray that looks blue but not like blue the things we still accepted we can change the color colors not that important but we go to painting as opposed to drawing because it does include drawing at color so color is important and number five is color you got to know your color you got to know that red yellow and blue are your primary colors they're your primary colors because you can't make those colors and when I see students I walk up to students then go I can't get that color up there and I look down and all they have on their palette is blue and red and I'm not going yeah with those two colors you're not going to get that color but if you add one more color to that conversation now you can create all color and some people think that the three primary colors of three primary colors because you can make all other colors but they're the primary colors because you can't make a red you can't make a blue and you can't make a yellow then to mix the colors you have to know how much of each other you have to know when you're mixing up a color does that color that I'm trying to mix require more blue more yellow more red more more black or more white if you ask yourself those separate questions you'll be able to come up to any color so colors not really that hard learning the temperatures of color like you found out you know about yo you your what you believed about blues was completely backwards yeah because nobody talks about that so anyway so knowing about color is important that color has a lot to do with temperature and values so all these are interlocked number six is brushstrokes how you put the paint on the canvas is crucial it says a lot about your style so if you paint if you use a palette knife you're going to come up with a different type of an effect than if you're using brushstrokes and if you're using brushstrokes timid Italy your painting will look somewhat timid cautious if you're an artist that pretty much copies off of a photograph and your goal in using brushstrokes is to push the color right up to the edge like a coloring book and stay within the lines your paintings going to suffer because of that but how you put that paint on that canvas says a lot and to understand that a vertical stroke out of one color will appear differently if you take that same color and do a horizontal stroke and that people will actually look at strokes like plain music and if you just go donk donk dun dun every brush stroke exactly the same over and over and over again it's like a four-year-old hitting a key on a piano and the mother goes always in that special he's so talented it's like no it's just a four-year-old banging on a piano it's how you put that paint on with the brushstroke is it a soft or hard is it long or short you can create a lot of tension and pause between the strokes because if you put that pause in your brushstroke will change and alter when you're putting in a branch in don't just wallow with a branch because it's crooked get that a brushstroke for a branch basically shows a season and when you do a branch it's like one season stop don't curve it or do anything stop because winter has happened now spring arises and now that branch goes further and further so when you're doing a brush stroke for our branches like branch branch branch branch five-year-old tree every year the branch changes a little different direction just like they do in your yard so the way you put paint on way you use your brushes something that we haven't talked about yet is edges edges are is almost if not more so important than the colors you choose you could paint anything in any color but how you manipulate the brushes has a lot to say about your painting your style and what you want the viewer to get so you only have hard edges around your central focal point and everything else is various degrees of softer edges we as we get older we start needing glasses most people at a certain age up glasses it's also the age when most people have money to buy paintings so you're actually like painting to the choir there okay now when we go down the cereal aisle we see Cheerios big bull letters lots of hard edges but then all of a sudden below that it says eating and sugar will kill you and those are in a little small print and the prints blurry and to see that as older people like us we have to put our glasses on and go oh my god this cereal will kill you it's like people who quit smoking because they have cancer it's like did you ever read the outside of your cigarette box and it says this product may cause cancer and then all of a sudden they realize Martha after smoking for seven years she's it's like yeah she read the what's on the outside of it yeah but it's in small print you know we as humans don't want to be bothered with what's out of focus we don't want to read the small details we don't have to put our our glasses on to be forced to that we like easy quick so you want good hard clean edges around your central focal point and then let the painting fall apart that are going to loose don't define everything and when you're put in a hard-edged on it take part of that edge and blur part of it let that edge soften and if you soften that edge it can actually create a form so you can create a ball by having a hard edge and go through the transitions of warm to cool and a hard dark to light but you can also create the feeling of it curving by softening the edge and if you have a hard edge - a soft edge now if you want your painting to have a certain speed a certain transition you transition the edges so you start off really blurry and slowly go to a central focal point that's very detailed and it kind of gives the feeling of light kind of coming in and quietly through or you could go from a blur to a hard edge and a split second and it shows the lights a little more forceful so the paint is a little more aggressive so how you handle your edges have a lot to do with the overall effect that you want your viewer to experience number eight transitions transitions are almost important as the colors that you choose if you don't have transitions in your painting on everything your painting will look stiff and boring transitions will actually dictate the intensity of light or not and if you don't have any transitions in your painting you really don't capture the movement of light and we know that light moves because we can put a prism outside or inside or whatever you do and have light hit it and it projects onto the wall that energy of light coming in projects and that energy can be really harsh or it can be filtered and how you want the feeling of that light to come into your painting all depends on how you handle the transitions from dark to shadow and how the objects that are being lit up go from light to shadow and how you handle all the transition there shouldn't be an inch in your painting that isn't going in through some transition either in temperature or in value it's a lot there's 12 steps there's not a lot you're almost done transition and edges and color and temperature so the next thing that you need to be a world-class artist and proficient at plein air painting is that you need to know how to draw darnit now painting is basically drawing with color if you don't know how to draw there's a lot of tricks out there that you can use so you can project out there and I know about projection I get into conversations with students that I coach I go how did you draw this in what I I used to project her it's like really why don't you draw it and they go well I can't draw and I go well when do you think you're gonna learn how to if you project everything now I know this conversation because when I was 13 I was married to a projector ring and everything didn't have the honeymoon but I was married to that projector I checked her that I had was this huge big metal thing with a huge lens in the front had an opening and back that was like eight inches by eight inches some of you might have seen these old projectors and you put that thing on top of your picture and it would project up you had to 200 watt lamp bulbs in there I know projectors I also knew that if I constantly used a projector I would never never learn how to draw so finally I was teaching a class when I was 14 and some people were coming in and I go oh man I I would I would only put something I found your card by the way he was in my high class case I would only put something under the projector as long as it was eight inches by eight and eight inches so if I could slide it in I would use it so I would never paint anything bigger that had a bigger source than that can you see how limiting that was and what I didn't know back then is that the lens of a projector really distorts everything and so I have a student that I love dearly she's from Iran and she insisted on projecting everything because she said oh it's just too hard to get people's faces when she's doing and so I would sit there and I would use a proportional divider or a prospect and I'd say why don't you use this and just what I could do with a projector is so much easier than that I said that yeah if you use a proportional divider you'll learn how to draw because drawing has nothing to do with the lines it has everything to do with the space between the lines so instead of looking at drawing a ball by the outer lines of it what you want to do is you want to see the space that the ball is and then enclose that space so oftentimes you can enclose this space you can make an arm by painting by drawing this negative space and you can draw the top of my arm by the relationship of the spaces above it never really concentrating on the arm and when you start noticing the spaces of what spaces occupy the space between the lines you start learning how to draw because that's what drawing is has nothing to do with drawing anything it has to do with drawing everything around it your thing just shows up because you've left it alone and you do that by using a proportional divider because it tells you how long that line has to be and the width of things and when you start learning that before you know it you start noticing that before you know it you start learning how to draw so a proportional divider will teach you how to draw when I started using a proportional divider on her drawings all of a sudden we get out to the out here and everything is already distorted in almost every camera even that the modern-day cameras still do that when you start using a proportional divider you'll go oh my god look at everything kind of starts to go out of whack as we get further away from the central focal point we adopted in photography you don't even see it but when you go back to accuracy and that's why people can tell whether or not you're drawing from a picture or drawing from life because it does show ever so slightly but even digital cameras have distortions of them so drawing is everything now do you have to be a good drawer to be a great painter no to be a good painter you don't have to learn how to draw you can push things around and guess at them to be a great painter you have to master drawing you have to master it and yet constantly worked at trying to develop that skill however you can if you want to learn how to take to learn to draw don't ever enroll yourself in a beginning drawing class because after the second week you'll want to take the pencils and stick them in your eye and you'll scream and you'll holler and grin out of there is there's nothing more boring than that if Molly falls asleep in my in my classes she definitely fall asleep and snooze and snore in the in the drawing classes she's so tired you okay it's your birthday it's a wonderful day and you're spending it with us we love you Molly so anyways so so drawing classes are boring if you want to learn how to do drawing you have to do a figure drawing figure drawing teaches you the skills on drawing and so even if you do really bad figure drawing you get better at it and drawings it as a skill that you can learn in practice just your drawing yeah yeah and the thing is the model moves and moves and moves them with there's nothing boring about it the next thing that you have to master is perspective now perspective isn't like your opinion on an object it basically is and you have two types of perspective you have aerial perspective and you have linear perspective aerial perspective is as things get further away from you they get lighter and cooler that's how you create depth and when I first heard our perspective was like what is that mean thank but it basically is when things come closer to you they're warmer and darker and as things get further away from as a get lighter in court and then linear perspective is the lines and you see this a lot in in beginning drawing books where you have like a train was on one one point perspective you'll be standing out a train track and the train tracks go to one point and in two-point perspective you'll actually see a box and the box go to one point and the other side of the box go to the other point it's a Celina perspective and it's very easy to kind of comprehend once you kind of get it but it requires a lot of practice men have an easier time with it because when we were cavemen we'd go out and hunt and then we had to get back to the cave otherwise you didn't survive your family didn't survive so consequently men know where north and south and east and west are and houston going how do you know that's north it's because it's kind of a built-in compass so you'll bring your paintings home and the first thing your husband will say your boyfriend or any male that's around you will look at it and go perspective is off and go really and they go yeah that barn yeah something's wrong with that perspective they might not be able to fix it but they'll notice it but that's where being a woman is good because women are really great in perception and feeling and so sometimes it's good that the perspective is wrong in the painting because if you make it all about the perspective perspective which men do the paintings look more Illustrated and stiff and so women work with oh it kind of feels this way because everything in their life is that they have to protect the children and if all of a sudden there's something happening outside they have to be ready so they work on intuition patterns color all this stuff women are experts at so men might be okay with perspective and it's to their because they make it all about the perspective women rock and everything else so it's not a woman thing man thing no better or ever it's just what is so anyway so perspective is something you can learn most of that stuff you can do in a book it's not hard yeah the next thing that you have to know as being a plein air painter is that you have to know where the horizon is and sometimes don't ask people so where's the horizon they say well where the sky meets the ground and so we're looking at a mountain scape and they'll go well it's see the sky where the sky ends and the mountains begin that's where that's where my horizon line is and so the horizon line in a painting is right where you are okay so where your eyes are is what the horizon is so the horizon for me up here is right where my eyes are and you can if you want to know how to do this is take a board and hold it up to your eyes and if you can get the board to actually disappear on both sides and all you can see is the side that kind of shows you straight out where the horizon line is your horizon line is exactly where your eyeballs are now if I go down like this my horizon line goes down too if I move that horizon line up I'm moving up but it's crucial to note because a that dictates where your perspective is where your vanishing points go and it has everything to do with every relationship that you possibly know out there so if you know where your horizon line is and you know where your eyes are in that then anything above you has to be treated differently than anything below you so lines point down as they're higher than you and lines point up because the whole world's about you anyway right so everything points up to your eyes or down to your eyes so when you're doing a tree you have to get when you're looking at a tree there's three points of perspective you look up at a tree you look at a tree and you look down and most people pain trees and go what does my tree look so stupid and it's because you're painting the whole tree is if your the whole thing when you're painting a tree you're looking up at the tree the branches are different and if you're looking at the tree where the branches come at you where you're looking at the lower branches where the branches you've seen the tops of the branches yeah it looks like it's going does that mean that you're realizing it's too high that means that you're actually you know you might be standing on the river but if you bring the horizon line if you bring the river up high it kind of looks like you're up high looking at the river down so when you stand at the ocean and back yeah well a lot depends on you know whether you're your landscape goes up and down okay so like usually when you go into like you're standing on a place that the river is is going away from you and the area is completely flat your horizon line is your is actually if you're standing there and just goes on forever if you're standing way back there your rising would be five feet from the ground back there so it's just above where the sky in the land meet and if you were standing back there and you're standing on the river the river still has to be below you so you literally have to say you know where is my horizon line and kind of put that in and then the whole all of that water has to fit below you in that space so we often think the curves are like this when the essence they're like this so when I'm standing at the ocean from the parking lot looking down the ocean is this big vast area and I can see from here to ever the higher ago the height of the horizon that I see more and more of the ocean but if I go into the ocean and ice I go all the way down and put my eyes right on the water all of a sudden that huge space becomes that small can make it disappear and all you see is actually just the top of the water going forever straight so your relationship and it becomes important when you do rocks so I do paintings of goats on the edge of a cliff all of the rocks that are above the goats first I've determine of the goats above me or below me and if they're above me I'd see their underbelly's if they're below me I see their backs and the rocks that are above me because it's a cliff I see the other part of the rocks they're the rocks that are in the middle I see at the rocks and any of the rocks that are below I see the top of the rocks becomes really important if you're painting Yellowstone and you're a half way between the artists outlook in the canyon you have to get that everything that's above you is going to be a different perspective than everything you look at and you wonder why everything looks so amateurish now a lot of people paying from photography because they're it fixes itself but it doesn't do any good to repeat something you don't understand you have to know this stuff and then you have to know it if you want to be an artist that does this and so you sit in a studio with nothing except brown paint a paintbrush and a vision of something you kind of have to know where am i standing where are they standing where am I looking up or down so perspective is really important it's not just how you put a building in but your relationship to that item and you need to know the relationship by discovering your horizon so horizon is really important and then number 12 Brian what do you think number 12 is there you go you have to learn by practicing when you learn by practicing you start developing a dialogue in your head of what things are and what they look like and you have to learn to be able to recreate that over and over and over again if you don't have the skills to highlight you need to learn that so that when you see a happen for just a split second you got to memorize that when I did my television show we would go out on location this is why our show rocks over all the other painting shows that are outdoors is they don't quite know this one little trick so we would go out doors and paint early in the morning and we'd be be out in the parks in the summertime in August and the Sun would come up like a four in the morning 4:30 in the morning so we'd be out there at 4:30 in the morning and we would wait for that very first little beam of light to come in and hit a bush in a rock and I'd be setting up in the dark and my cameraman would say okay what is this painting about what are you gonna highlight I'm gonna say well there's a central focal point it should be there that's where it's going to happen and then that bush and that rose when the light comes out you're going to film that and that you're going to film that as the light comes up and so I'm literally dictating where I think the lights gonna pop before it's even there and then the as things happen that's a Oh cat get that get that get that get that so the cameraman was taking these shots because I knew by the time I was going to be painting it was gonna be almost 10 o'clock and nothing looks good at 10 o'clock so while I was painting out there I had to make references I'd say now notice the beautiful little light on this one little bush here and the beautiful highlights in it well while I was painting it it wasn't there but I knew we had it in a can and so what he would do is he would splice in that shot that he shot at 4:00 in the morning and say see this is the the what that that looks like and they would think it's real time I'll go look at that beautiful light on that rock at 10 o'clock there's no more beautiful light it's just light so he would splice in that and I would paint it from my memory because we didn't have cellphones back then I didn't have any access to instant photos so I had to memorize all these little keys and if you watch my videos and you'll see that at the very end we kind of pull back so it reveals the picture and the painting because you know people in Nebraska they want to see you know they they're not painters but they stumbled upon this painting program and they're curious to see how well I paint and I knew that you know if I couldn't paint it they go Oh Martha he doesn't know how to paint why he's on PBS so it's like oh wow he actually painted it like that but when we did the final reveal it was 12 o'clock in the afternoon and we started it at 6:00 in the morning with all of the takes and everything and it usually took about 4 or 5 hours to do that painting but when we pulled back the scene had become something totally different but the composition was still there you know so it did look like that so the we pulled back we we didn't linger over it because you could tell that the lighting and everything was manipulated to be what was in the morning but we'd always go back to the morning shot go back to the morning shot so people were reminded but they all took memory skills so you have to remember what the scene was because it will change every 7 minutes Monet did a study and decided and determined and he did a series of paintings him and his wife went out and they painted for seven minutes and they put the painting away and then they painted another seven minutes and put the painting away and they painted another these are the haystack paintings and then he did another painting for seven minutes then the following day he took that same painting again and painted within those seven minutes that he painted that one against her he would have now 14 minutes on that painting and he put it away and he did that over a series of days sergeant did the lamplighters which is the little kids lighting lamps with all of those beautiful lilies because he was inspired at sunset these kids lighting lanterns for a wedding or party he said oh that would be a beautiful idea for a painting so he hired the kids to come every night and pose for him at that particular window where the light which is perfect and then you have to adjust because the lights change so it's always that window and another ten minutes later another ten minutes later and of course the Loess died so you actually put sticks in the ground and tied paper mache or paper tissue paper out to mimic the the little plants and so all the lighting and so he painted that painting over progression of several days but it's all keeping that memory that idea see he has a concept he said the concept was all I want to paint this at that time of day I want to have my central focal point to be this the horizon for this painting is going to be here my compositions going to be this all these things that we talked about he put into that one painting so those are my 12 keys to great painting if you have to check coaching for yourself whether you're a beginner or an advanced painter please don't hesitate to give me a call at four one five six oh six nine zero seven four join us on our website at www.flcfs.org [Music] you

Channel: Stefan Baumann

Views: 85,008

Keywords: Plein Air, painter, Stefan Baumann, Landscape, painting, The Grand View, American National Park, How to paint, ALLA PRIMA, art, oil painting, wildlife, still life, Drawing, color, Perspective, brush strokes, edges, concept, focal point, composition, values, plein air painting, plein air painter, en plein air

Id: mqqkB6iOEoo

Length: 40min 37sec (2437 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2019