How to Make an Underpainting GOOD

Now I want to discuss what makes an underpainting good. So for that I have a sketch of the painting that we're going to be doing. So see this? Is that visible? Okay, you're going to notice that in this drawing what I did is I didn't focus on any details. What I want is I want the geometric shapes that compose this image in the simplest possible way. And I'm looking at these shapes as abstract properties. What do I mean by that? So you see this shape over here? Well it looks like you did it sort of like a planar head almost. Yes, yes, just like see that shape over here? That's the shape of the cheek. I'm just looking at it as an abstract thing that if I had to do like a graffiti rendering of this, like I had to cut out a stencil and do that's what I would want to get, right? So in an underpainting you're not shooting for more than that. If you start making an underpainting that's too pretty that everybody falls in love with, you're ruining your process because it's going to make it so annoying for you to cover it up with paint. You're just going to be like a slave to the underpainting. You're going to be like, oh adorable little underpainting, like I don't want to ruin you and then every paint that you put on there is never going to be good enough. So no good. We can't make an underpainting too pretty. We want to make everything correct. That's it. Just make it correct and if you can make it so simple as to not fall in love with it that would be the best case scenario. Again, this is a very big liability for you because people who come from a background in drawing, I'm preparing you in advance, your underpainting for a while will be prettier than your painting because you have more experience in drawing than in painting. So it makes perfect sense that your underpainting is going to be good. So every painting is going to be accompanied by an annoying feeling of now it's time to ruin my underpainting again. Yeah I've had I've had experiences doing that. Get used to it. So bad. Embrace the pain. It's gonna happen. It's gonna it happened to me for years and honestly sometimes it still does. I make a killer underpainting and then the painting's all right but I kind of like the underpainting more. It's how it is. Now I'm gonna say I swear we're gonna start painting but I'm gonna say like one more thing okay and I hope this is not overwhelming in terms of information but it's necessary information. So why don't we paint on a white canvas? This is another huge mistake that amateur painters make and it goes like this. In drawing we need the white because we're working against the white. If I didn't have white when I was drawing in charcoal nothing would shine. Nothing would be bright. But in painting if we are treating the passive white of the canvas as something that helps us create value differentiations we're not utilizing the power of white paint. The power of using white and lights in the painting actively. In painting is a medium where you need to operate by using light actively not passively like in drawing and what happens is if you leave any areas of your painting white at any point in the painting process what happens is you're mixing your colors and you're putting them down and let's say you're mixing whatever a highlight on a forehead it's never gonna look as light and as bright as the white paper because the white paper is so overwhelmingly white that the result of all these paintings who started on a white surface is they're all too light. In general like all the colors are constantly way too light because they've been mixed in competition with the white surface. Nothing will ever be as light as the light surface so we don't want this competition. If I'm working on a brown as soon as I put in a white paint it's it lights up with brightness. That's what you want. You want your first light stroke to already be explosive. You don't want to wait until you cover everything up. Way too annoying. Really hurts the color mixing. All right? Make sense? Yes. Sorry. I should have said yes. Perfect. Okay. I'm gonna start painting. So you're gonna watch me do this quickly like a demon so that you can watch and ask questions and then it's gonna be all you and all right. So what do I do when I start? Grab a big brush. Grab a lot of solvent and the first thing I want to get rid of is the embarrassment of working in front of an empty surface. I want to carve out my composition from this empty surface and the first thing that's useful for me is to mark distances from edges because the shapes of the background are the largest shapes available to me and I want to work big. So distance from this edge until I get the head about yay much. Distance over here there's kind of a triangle. Around here we have something going like that and then a triangle going like that and then here this distance is very easy to measure. Kind of like this and then we have this kind of diagonal and this kind of thing that kind of thing followed by that kind of thing very loose boom very incorrect but everything is here you know I know where my background is I know where my figure is I just measured what's the distance from here to here roughly you know this is this is still open to change but I started by getting everything in my frame as quickly as I can all right now I'm gonna make corrections adaptations fix those shapes up this diagonal beautifully continues this diagonal so very important to remember that I'm gonna chop into that get that dark shape over here I'm gonna get that dark shape over here this is a very light shape it looks kind of like that don't worry gonna come together I'm demonstrating the mindset of working loosely in the underpainting and allowing the beauty of how open oil paint is to modification to play in our favor so all of this is basically shadow except for the hand which is you know roughly roughly here looks roughly like that this thing can be smaller just get all this to be dark not fussing with anything yet that's what I mean don't make it pretty just give yourself a road map so that you know where things are all right now let me get at that background and while I get at the background it's a good time to adjust the shapes that were incorrect with the figure the background is a way to draw the figure so now I lost all the marks I made here that's okay I did that on purpose because next time I find them they're gonna be better make sense so far okay so unlike working in graphite where everything is very like as you called it reliable here you know if if working in graphite I make the the comparison that working with graphite is a little bit like uh working in marble if you're a sculptor you just kind of put moves there and they stay working with oil especially in the underpainting is more similar to working with clay you put something in you want to take it out you take it out you want to put it in you put it in it's a lot more fluid literally but also conceptually okay keep that going shadow shadow shadow shadow shadow shadow shadow smaller very easy make something smaller no big deal now if I want to erase I take a new brush with nothing on it I dip it into my damsel or in your case the turquenoid and I just remove another way to do this is with uh with a rag that's possible but yes just removing this but if any questions come up you let me know so the main differences between drawing and painting again are texture I wouldn't call it texture texture is just one iteration of this but okay better way to put it is that there's no uh direct relationship between amount of material and any kind of variation whether it be color value or anything they're independent so materiality is how I would call it you need to choose where you want to make it thick where you want to make it thin where you want to make it textured where you want to make it opaque where you don't all that stuff you get to choose in drawings you don't right so you see what I'm doing it's like not not trying to make it pretty too much I'm just like just putting things where they belong so that later I know where I am where I'm going not too worried about details yeah very loose very very loose with I feel like mayonnaise right now well mayonnaise is a great way to look at it you know it's the fact that mayonnaise you know very heavy on texture and we don't really want that right now no but just he copied uh the old masters in the loo so well who did it exactly that was his job he got paid to do that oh really oh yeah I think there was a story of uh that being how uh you'll correct me if I get this wrong but I think that might be true yeah and that they got being the badass that he was wasn't even copying it in a sketchbook he was copying it onto a zinc plate to make a dry point a dry point uh print oh wow oh badass like going through the loo with a piece of copper and a needle and and you know I would do that that is so cool I would do that yeah I took printmaking in um in Venice I love printmaking I I worked in the printmaking tech at Parsons oh that's awesome yeah printmaking is great yeah it's so much fun and so with printmaking actually this again brings me to like the same kind of example that I was using at the beginning of the lesson that in painting you want to make sure that you don't torture your your painting with with overworking any area in printmaking that's the kind of thing that you never ever can do because all the stuff happens on a plate you know and then the paper is always so fresh it doesn't matter like how much labor you put onto the working of the plate itself the paper always feels like you only touched it once so yeah that's part of why it always has this like luminous beauty to it because you only touch the painting once like it's gonna stay super fresh and trying to get that done with painting really requires us to think of the palette like a printmaker would think of their etching plates you know what i mean kind of well almost i'll take kind of this is what i've got so far all right so you totally crop this like fully yeah yeah all right which is unjustified but we can go it's totally unjustified because you did it by making the figure larger not because you have a different format but it's okay we'll live with it i always do that i'm sorry no it's all right but that's kind of why i mean okay here here's here's i'm gonna pause to explain this but it's not it's not to like reprimand you or anything it's just because i want you to be in control of your compositions not your compositions in control of you yeah so i want us to set a benchmark for what the composition is going to be and then just try to hit it as a practice like okay let's just see if we can decide on what the composition is and then hit that composition so yeah if you're attached to this underpainting that's fine we'll just assume that you told me ken i like velasquez's composition but i can do better and i'm gonna i'm gonna crop it closer and i'm gonna go like okay well that's ambitious but the compositional decision is super critical because when you're working on your own piece you have something in mind you have to make sure that in the underpainting the primary goal is to get things to be you know in scale and in frame the way that you expect them to be that's part of what this exercise is for so for this time we're gonna roll with it if you want if you don't want to no i don't but in general yeah all of the underpainting is to be dominant over your you know arrangement all right makes sense right yep because you know we this always happens you're like oh my god this is gonna be amazing it's gonna be like the family and the cat is gonna be on the side and the cat gets cropped yeah yeah you can't let that control you in this way it's just not not healthy for a painter that's smart i will try my best not to do it in the future yeah you know and if you're very very studious and you want to continue this painting next time you could go the extra mile and make us a new one you could call that your homework okay get one done that is like the as close to velasquez's composition as your surface enables you to do okay uh what kind of paper would you suggest do you know uh arches oil painting no let me show you a second see i am like obeying my own rule i figure out that like like my face was too low in the composition i'm moving the face upwards i don't care you know this is the this is the stage at which to do this because everything is fluid everything is flexible later if i want to move it forget it it's gonna be super annoying so now is the time to make use of the flexibility that the underpainting offers you and not to fall in love with something you just did in 10 minutes but rather demand perfection compositional perfection notice i kind of went into it now with a smaller brush okay you're like now i need to make some smaller adjustments so when that time happens it's okay to switch to a smaller brush but you don't have to switch to a different mindset it's just because some of these shapes are difficult to get at accurately with the big brush so i'm just chopping up that face you notice what i chopped it in uh and i'm going to be making adjustments that were just a little bit too clumsy with the large brush to to achieve okay how's yours looking yeah i can show you yeah show me okay is that better with the hand gone yes ah okay hugely improved yes good yay great see i can i can i can correct very good as much like a masterpiece just a sketch just it's just uh it's not even a sketch you know it's just a way to learn how to paint that's it yeah maybe so many times you know i i sketched this painting at the met like many many times and i will probably sketch it many more times because every time i do it i learn something new it's so brilliant isn't it the ear the the intimation of the ear right is just it's so good a hint you know yeah the whole like it's amazing but the masters they weren't masters of painting they were masters of getting away with not painting i know that's that's something that once you understand you're like oh basically it's all about how i can not paint it not how i can paint it like how i can get you to paint it in your imagination yeah totally that's the true mastery totally it's it's it's you know magic it really is i understand that i needed to move the back of the head no worries moving the back of the head everything is fluid everything's doable i don't compromise the underpainting is really the best time for you to not fall in love with anything you're doing and you know if i'm gonna say it again if i were strict we would have restarted it but we're not you're gonna do it for homework right right i will i promise okay good i will we're slowly like slowly getting into that mindset because you learn you learn classical art you can't you really can't do something in 10 minutes and then just like let it dominate you just never gonna work i want to show you i don't know if you noticed the degree to which i just moved the face and did you notice that or did that here do it again i can't i was just gonna say wait wait and i just did this okay because i am looking at the angle between the face and the hand and there needs to be like an actual angle between them that my drawing was not expressing and if that means that i need to go through the painful motion of moving the face i move the face um yeah you gotta do it even though it's compromising about any like right now the only thing i care about is getting the composition to be organized correctly so if something is standing in the way like a pretty face that's in the wrong spot that face is a goner that's just you know tough love face yeah just we have to we have to get into this mindset because we're we're seriously at risk of having the painting control us if we're not asserting uh this this uh mentality okay soon i'm going to show you how this moves forward even further very soon i'm just erasing massively because this was way too large then this can come up a little bit more which is good news much better so i started with a head that was way too big but now it's finding finding its place more comfortably always difficult the size of the head so when it's so small inside of the format yeah well and i think what thing with this painting is that you're immediately drawn to the face and everything else is like irrelevant right right that's that's why you make it bigger because you it feels bigger right but but we have to understand where that when that thing is capturing us and you know uh how do you say uh count have countermeasures in place do not let that happen to us now try to take it upon yourself to you know actively decide i'm going to keep it simple going to purposefully keep it simple because getting these very few shapes you're going to notice we've been working on it for roughly the same amount of time me and you and i'm resisting by all means adding any more information all i'm doing is i'm changing the locations of existing information like what isn't in the right place i'm only interested in place right now just where is it so that later when i come in with real paint with real color i'm gonna just not have to worry about is it in the right spot so in order to be able to get to that point uh i'm gonna really benefit if i manage to keep it as simple as humanly possible and it's actually like really nice because this painting is so complex that it'd be nice not to have to worry about everything at once you know yeah i'm separating my concerns like right now i'm only worried about a very small number of things but those small number of things you know i'm taking them very very seriously like for example now i discovered that this shoulder needs to move a little bit so you know no mercy i'm gonna move it how's that uh how's that under painting looking oh much better thank you i'm trying to be super loose it's hard don't forget about the loose the loose is loose is just a tool managed to do this while being tight fantastic there's no there's no uh how do you say it there's no like scorecard for looseness looseness is just how i think is most beneficial to arrive at the result but what you're being graded on is not looseness it's simplicity okay lucidity like how can you take a very complicated phenomenon like this portrait and render it simply like really really simply that's the key here and now uh from looking at it my my suggestion to you is check out the width of that forehead because there's a slight feeling in the reference that he's kind of looking upwards and people who look upwards the more upwards they look the smaller their forehead yeah right so help us see that for shortening a little bit more i'm moving it up no mercy no mercy there we go oh i love it no i took a picture so i wouldn't be sentimental about it got it okay whatever gets us there we have to leave the sentimentality like for another time because we're trying to learn so yeah the thing about velasquez is like for example right i totally understand you being sentimental if we were working like for example you were drawing a portrait of your friend who lives in australia and she's just here for one day we have to nail it she's gonna leave velasquez isn't going anywhere right as many times as possible if you told me listen ken like i have a model tomorrow and they're leaving and i need you to give me all the tips for drawing the model fast and well because that's my only chance i'd be like all right i'm with you like we have to you know it's an emergency but since this is not an emergency and velasquez isn't going anywhere i really want to prioritize like learning from it as opposed to like rendering it perfectly because it's so unlikely that your rendering or my rendering will be the best rendering we make of this painting in our lifetime if i try this again in five years gonna look better if you try this again in five years gonna look better so this is just a reflection of what we need to do now where we are right now with our knowledge of painting and this knowledge is constantly expanding so there's really no need to be sentimental about it how's that thesis i agree i'm seeing let me just try to to accentuate the diamond shapes in a in a comical way just to explain what i'm seeing i'm seeing like one two three four see that diamond got it how i how i sacrificed the painting for us see that that's the spirit this is the laboratory of diamond no need to be attached to it there's really no need here there there's my diamond much much better this has been immensely helpful great the thing you need to know about about a painting that you're going to continue is that it's always better if you're in doubt to leave things softer than they need to be as opposed to sharper because softening something up later really hard sharpening something up later really easy okay we're like on the border between making something really defined and making something really like foggy choose foggy if you're gonna continue the painting always choose foggy how's that ah so much better wow wow yes hugely improved hugely good yeah now the one thing the bottom of the nose pull it to the right because you're you're you're erring on that verticality again okay you want to make sure that you know our head is going to try to make us uh render every portrait as something symmetrical because we're used to thinking oh you know heads are symmetrical but this guy's in three quarters and everything that's happening on the left is larger than the things that are happening on the right so this nose needs to kind of bite into that cheek that's on the right got it now i want to do one cool thing together yeah yeah do you notice how the line is before you take it out if you could evaluate my opinion and see if you agree that the line is like perking the illusion do you notice that i do i already took it out though unfortunately it's just that you know in reality there really aren't any lines you know it's just spots that meet other spots and if both spots are light it's very common that there will be no lining between them and if both spots are dark it's very common that there will be no lighting between them and it's easy to explain this to you because you're an art history nerd you want to be thinking constantly about the man the one and only caravaggio yes right the way that they connect there's no difference between the shadow of the background and the shadow of the right right there's no lines ever so he basically started this whole baroque thing oh so much better way way way better good but this angle you're looking vertical oh you're right and as i was saying uh what caravaggio does to shadows everybody started to do to shadows and would also be beneficial to do to lights you know the way shadows connect is the same way that lights should connect you know what if there's light next to light we don't need to create an artificial separation because that's not realistic in real in realism when two bright things are up against each other the border between them disappears and we want to embrace that so no more lines between noses and cheeks if they're both in the light agreed agreed okay i've done this for two for long enough i've been having fun with this uh i'm gonna do that cool thing that i was talking about uh and i'm gonna do it with some partially dry paint to make this deal even sweeter so that you can see that it's not too bad and it goes like this thank you for watching i really appreciate it and if you enjoyed this video please don't forget to like and subscribe for longer videos please consider supporting me on patreon at patreon.com slash ken goshen for lessons please visit my website at see you next time