What Makes Good Brush Work? - Oil Painting Instruction

so in this video I want to talk about what makes good brush work um and really basically how you should move your brush when you're painting um and first of all there's different uh types of brush work and there and there's not like there's one specific you know way that you should move your brush that um that is right and one that's wrong but it's more that there's two qualities that I believe you always want to have in your in your painting and that is number one is you want to have a little bit of texture on the surface you don't want to ever get all blendy blendy where it's just a big smooth and your eye doesn't have anything to grab onto now I don't mean texture like protruding from the canvas you know stuff I mean like where you have little bits of flicks of paint and and Swirls and whatever it is it's not just the smooth surface um so at the end of this video I'm going to go through some uh classical paintings and show you exactly uh what I what I'm talking about but secondly in addition to having a texture on the surface you want that texture to be abstract so I'm just going to demonstrate here so I've got here on the left side and the right side two different colors with a hard line between them so I'm going to start by showing you the wrong way to do it and that is having a very regular brush work without any abstraction to it at all just left right left right all the way down and then maybe some up and down to to make it look even more smooth and then what you're left with with is something without hardly any texture at all on the surface um so that's not good and the other type of brush work other than the first one which I call blendy blendy to my students there's another one uh which I call refer to as pokey pokey and Pokey Pokey where you just do this this bit and this is just another way of blending and when you're all done it almost gives you the same results as the regular uh smooth pattern so now let me show you the proper way to join these two areas together and that's with an abstract brush work as you see that I'm doing here and you can see that my brush is just moving in all kinds of irregular ways you know I'm poking at it I'm twisting I'm putting in um the abstraction as I paint so I'm never I never have a regular stroke it's just kind of a Twist sometimes I roll the brush drag it twist it whatever but there's just this random um movement of the brush and what you end up with is this much more abstract pattern uh there's still texture on the surface and if we look at all three of these uh different um ways of blending from a from a distance so this is like if you step back 7t away from your painting you can see that the one in the middle has some texture to it and the other ones are just without texture without any abstraction so uh let's take a look at some classic paintings here so in this first painting by anom uh and I'm not sure I'm pronouncing that right but you know from a distance this is a super high realistic painting and you might think that the skin is very smooth but if we get in close you can see that even in this very realistic painting there's some texture on the surface and in this case he's even using the canvas to provide some of that texture which is a very common thing and uh you see it all the time in fact if we look at this painting of Edgar de um this man here and you look at the wall behind him you can see that a lot of the texture that's in there is from the canvas coming through the paint um but he's also not Blended at all up there is some surface texture if we look at this this painting of these women working in the field um you might think that this has been all smoothed up but if we go in and zoom in on the background and we look at the sky you can see that it still has some texture on it and that texture is also abstract it's not a regular uh pattern and if we look at this painting by cyer and we zoom in really tight and look at the brush work you can see that it's that same sort of abstract brush work that I demonstrated a minute ago um so this is how NE and notice this is like skin this texture on his skin isn't even really representational of what skin texture looks like which brings me to another point and that is you always need texture on the surface but that texture does not need to be associated with the item that you're painting so in other words if you look at these grapes here these are smooth grapes but if we look really close at the texture on the surface it's the texture of a plaster wall or something it has nothing to do with with grapes and that's because our mind does not care what that texture is but it we need a texture it should be abstract but it doesn't need to represent the item itself I've got another video where I paint some peaches and the whole video is to show that we're not going to try to duplicate the peach fuzz we're just going to give some abstract texture and that abstract texture is going to represent anything want it doesn't it the eye doesn't care and here's one more painting this Seascape which looks like it has a very smooth Blended sky but if we look at it up close you can see that even here we see texture okay so um let's look at a there's one other thing that's a really big deal and that is this uh tendency for people when they're painting something to oversimplify whatever pattern they see so I'll give you an example if we look at this cloth here and we zoom in on this uh section here so if I go in and I outline every little Shadow and all the shapes this is what that pattern looks like and you can see how complex it is but what people will do is they'll take the same pattern and they'll oversimplify it and paint something that has more of a pattern like this so if we look at these leaves in the sky here same deal let's zoom in on this little part right here and this is typically how somebody would paint it by leaf leaf leaf leaf and just sort of making it much more simple than it really is um but if you look at the actual leaves you can see that it's much more abstract and much more different so it's this tendency to oversimplify uh this is real typical like in clouds if we look at these clouds here um this is how people would end up painting this just as a bunch of big puff balls but if you look at the actual what's really going on you can see that it's way more complicated than that now that brings me to my uh this other point that I want to make so instead of going in like on this cloth or these clouds or the leaves and verbatim trying to exactly copy all of that messiness which might take forever instead you paint with this abstract messy stroke that that is a you know similar to the texture or the shapes that you see in the cloth or the leaves or the clouds um so you put in that messiness and you keep that abstraction in your own painting just like it like you see it in nature it may not be verbatim every little turn and every little Shadow is exactly the same that's less important but what's more important is that we're not oversimplifying everything which is something that I see my students doing all the time you know if they're painting cloth they just simplify and so you've got to keep that sort of abstraction in everything that you do well I hope that's helpful and I just wanted to quickly remind you that we now have all of our paints back in stock and they will stay in stock so we have the full essential pallet in stock um and also we are in full development of our new ever never dry pallet box which I'm really excited about so keep an a lookout for that thank you guys for watching and we'll see you in the next one

Channel: Draw Mix Paint

Views: 47,264

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Id: gp-lY7WcqkQ

Length: 7min 40sec (460 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2024