I painted myself underwater | Oil Painting Time Lapse | Realistic Underwater Scene

Thank you for joining me for this oil painting time-lapse. I'm painting an underwater scene and I hope you enjoy. My first layer is always monochromatic to establish basic shapes and values. I let it dry and then I go in with color. I paint in layers and I add more detail with each new layer. They need some time to dry in between so I always have several paintings that I'm working on at a I also prefer to not paint myself but I don't always have models available to me especially during the situation in the world right now. It makes things even more challenging in that regard so in many paintings I end up using myself as the reference simply out of necessity. I never view them like self-portraits. I just see a human figure reflecting light from its environment and it's a vehicle for conveying emotion or an idea. I had the vision for this underwater series for many years now but an underwater housing station for my camera costs more than the camera itself and I wouldn't get to use it that much anyway so I just used my phone to film videos underwater and then chose my favorite shots from there. A few months ago two of my wonderful friends who've been working from home and social distancing let me stop by and use their swimming pool so that I can get some reference work done for this painting series. When I started painting figures immersed in water many years ago it was a way for me to find internal peace from the chaos I was feeling inside during that time and to this day water still represents that tranquility to me. It's never really changed and it's partially why I love painting it so much aside from it being really fun. So that's the finished painting. Lately I've been trying to work in a looser style and have more visible brush strokes in my art but I still have a long way to go to where I'd like to be. Like I said this underwater theme is a new series I'm starting so I've been working on a couple other paintings that are similar but they're much smaller. One of which I actually made as a demo tutorial that you can paint along to over on my Patreon page for the price of a Starbucks coffee. I want to give a huge warm welcome to all the new subscribers who found me from my last video which somehow broke through the algorithm. I have no idea what happened but wow thank you so much for subscribing and giving my channel and my art a chance. I'm so excited to share more paintings and art adventures with you so thank you for being here. I hope you enjoyed this video. Thank you so much for watching. I hope to see you in my next video and I'm wishing you a beautiful and inspiring day.