How to Paint a Portrait #1 - Drawing

We're going to get started. And so, as you already know, this course will focus on the various stages of painting a portrait. Portraits are something we're all super interested in. We all want to know how to do them. And I've been getting a lot of requests from people asking me to basically use this wonderful platform that CCS has made possible for us where I can meet you every week and continue a process from beginning to end so that you can really see how the portrait develops through all the varying stages. So today we're going to start with the first stage, arguably the most important stage, the charcoal drawing stage. Because if you don't have a good drawing on your surface, you're never going to know where to put the paint marks, right? This is absolutely critical because by getting this drawing done correctly, you are providing yourself with a very high quality roadmap for the continuation of the process. Because we all know when we're just starting out that there is this really annoying thing that tends to happen, like we want to paint the portrait, so we paint the nose, and then we paint an eye, and then oops, the ear gets cut off. And we get really frustrated because we love the nose that we painted, but suddenly the composition fell apart. And when the composition falls apart, you know, it's kind of game over. It doesn't really matter how beautiful that nose is because if the frame is not compelling, if everything is that's being put in the frame is in the wrong place, even if it's done super beautifully, if it's not in the right place, there's really nowhere for the painting to go. So we're really going to focus on that right now. And I'm sure a question is going to come up with regards to why my surface, why this paper is not white. Because conventionally, when you buy paper, it's white. Well, I've taken the liberty to paint this canvas ahead of time. And the reason I did that is because, well, there's actually two reasons. One reason is that when I end up painting on this surface, I want to make sure that I can make dark marks and make sure that they look dark, and also make light marks and have them look light, right? Now, that's not going to be possible if my paper is light. Because if my paper is light, bright white, I want to put a light mark down, it's always going to be looking a little darker than the pure bright white that we see on a paper that's store-bought, right? So everything is always going to end up looking not light enough and be really frustrating. The second reason that I covered this with a thin layer of paint is because this particular paper is so extremely absorbent that when I put down charcoal on it, it just won't let me erase. It drinks up all of my charcoal powder and won't let go. So by covering it with a layer of paint, I kind of counteract that degree of absorbency and make sure that every mark that I'm making today is going to be relatively erasable. So today we're going to be using willow charcoal, a charcoal eraser called a chami. This is basically deer skin and maybe I will need another eraser. We'll see how well this goes, but for now it's just very simple material, charcoal and eraser. And let's get started. So the first thing that I want to make sure that I understand about my paper is the relationship between, because I want to copy the whole portrait. So I want to understand whether or not my frame, how the dimensions of my frame relate to the dimensions of the frame of my reference. So in my estimation, my frame goes vertically a little bit more than the original. So I'm going to just make a little bit of a mark here, kind of eyeballing it, saying that I'm going to have an extra, yay much, you know, it's not accurate for now, but just kind of letting myself know that I'm going to be having a painting that's a little bit more vertical than the original, but this thing is really going to help me measure. Because now you're going to see that the second thing I do, if I start making very simple marks that are going to outline the silhouette of my portrait based on distances, geometric distances from the edges of the frame, that's why the frame is so important. So first distance that I want to see is where does the shoulder start? So the shoulder is around at a third of the canvas, roughly here. Then we have this kind of triangle, this negative space that is roughly here, right around the third of the canvas, dividing this into three, right? Then the second quarter, this area here, another vector. So there's a triangle that goes roughly here. And then we have the dark edge of the face looking pretty vertical for now. I'm keeping everything extremely simple. Then from the edge of this side of the frame, it's pretty close to the edge where the hair is. So I'm marking that. Then I'm going to mark the back of the head, this vector over here, and the collar. So as you notice, what I've done so far, there's nothing pretty about it. Nothing aesthetic about this at all. It's extremely simple, extremely geometric, and has one goal in mind. I don't want to get lost. You know, I don't want to start by painting an eye and realizing that the back of the head is going to get cropped. By starting from working on the shapes of the background, by working from the outside in, I guarantee that nothing that I care about is going to get cropped. From here, I can still get lost. But I'm not going to get lost by a ton. The worst I can do is get lost a little bit. And that's already a huge benefit for me. Now, I continually look at these shapes, the shapes of the background, in order to help guide myself to the correct proportion. So for example, right now, this shape, I'm identifying that whatever this is, the collar, needs to be a little farther away, a little bit here. You see, I'm trying to look at this shape of the background as my active shape, because this is a simple geometric shape. If I were to look on the inside, hair, ear, neck, collar, a million complicated things that are super difficult to see. But this, super easy, just a geometric shape. So I'm using the abstract qualities of these shapes for as long as possible to really help myself nail down the proportions of the figure in relation to the frame. Hopefully, you're all following along. And thanks again for joining me for this painting lesson. Currently, it's a drawing lesson, but it's going to be a painting lesson. And it's going to be really exciting to work on this together with you and show you all the different stages of how we make this portrait work. All right, now I'm using my eraser, and happy to discover that indeed, I can erase. So notice this chamois is super fast. It erases really, really quickly, and really, really well. So it makes charcoal super useful for making this original mapping stage. Because if I were working in pencil, you know, erasing pencil just takes forever. You know, you're like trying to erase, and it's just way, way, way too slow. What I want from this stage of my process is speed. I want to be able to maneuver and update my shapes very quickly, very simply. And charcoal, because of how erasable it is, just does a far superior job than pencil in this regard. Okay, try to start getting into the inside a little bit. So we're noticing this is the neck, and then kind of goes like that. Now here we have these two lightest triangles. And what I'm looking for is, again, vectors, vectors of activity. What's the angle? What is this angle? It's so easy to get it wrong and do this, or do this, or do that. You don't want to think jacket. You want to think, what's the angle of this vector? Once you are able to see all these things, like abstract shapes, you don't have that moment of getting blinded by the psychological consequence of, oh no, this doesn't look like a jacket. Forget about the jacket for now. Look at this thing as an abstract shape, and it's really going to help you measure everything a lot more correctly. Here we have this diamond, light diamond shape. It looks roughly like that. All right. Can you give me a quick rundown of your materials again one more time? Yeah, my rundown is extremely quick, so get ready to take two notes, right? Willow charcoal and chamois eraser. The chamois eraser is spelled in French, so it's extremely annoying to spell, and I can't spell it off the top of my head, because my native tongue is neither French nor English, but I can definitely write it in the chat later. If you go to an art store and look for it, they might not know the name chamois, but if you tell them deerskin eraser, they should know what this is. The benefit of it, as I was saying, is the speed at which you're able to erase. Now, I'm working specifically with natural willow charcoal and not vine charcoal and not synthetic charcoal for the same reason that I'm insisting on working with the chamois and not with the kneadable eraser. Same reason being quick to erase, quick to erase. The thing about vine charcoal is that it's much more suitable for making perfectly realized and rendered charcoal drawings, because it's much more manageable if you're trying to get very, very, very accurate shapes onto your paper, but it erases way slower, and when it erases way slower, it makes it super annoying for this part of the drawing process. Right now, I'm really prioritizing the ability to be dynamic, to be able to erase fast, to be able to apply shapes fast. It's all about speed and about the ability to change the decisions that I'm making, because I don't want to commit to any decision as of now. I just started working on it, so it's extremely unlikely that all these first moves I'm making are 100% correct, and if I know I'm being honest with myself about this, and I know, Ken, you're not so likely to make 100% correct decisions on your first pass of trying to arrange this composition, then the follow-ups would be, all right, Ken, so you should adjust by making sure that you're using materials that don't weigh you down, that make it possible for you to make quick changes and alterations to these decisions that you're making. All right, so now we kind of have the bottom of the composition more or less, you know, satisfactory. I'm kind of happy with that, and we're gonna sneak into starting to work on the face, which is, of course, the most exciting part of all of this. The reason that I'm delaying is because I really want to make sure that the face is the right size. I wouldn't want to start chopping into this marble block, making it into smaller and smaller shapes, and later discover, oh man, I made the head too small. That would be such a bummer, so I'm really trying to understand how much real estate does this thing really occupy when I'm looking at the canvas as a whole, and what's gonna, you know, what might actually be nice is that in the original Bouguereau painting, you know, it's very close to the edge of the frame, and I, you know, I'm a big fan of his painting ability, but I'm not sure I'm a fan of that decision, so it might actually be fun to have a little bit more air in my rendition of this portrait. I don't know if that's heresy to say, but that's what I'm thinking about, and now look at what I'm gonna do right now. So this whole thing became a little dull. You want to sharpen your charcoal? Break it, and now we have all the edges sharp again. Very quick, very doable. Now I want to start making some general lines, so I'm looking for the large shapes that can tell me a lot about the subject. So this large shape of the hair, very visible, very easy to see, and tells me a lot about the major divisions. This shape of the hair, easy to see. This shape of the hair, see? Having made those shapes now, I already know a lot. I already know a lot about where things are going to be. Keeping things simple, I'm going to erase these wonderful circles that are distracting me at present, and see where we go with this. It could be that eventually I'm going to need to work with a smaller charcoal stick. We'll see if we get to that point, because I'm using a relatively thick one, which is good for doing things quickly when you're just starting out, but now when I'm getting to a point where I'm working on things that are a little bit more delicate, it starts to be threateningly clumsy. So we'll see how that goes. How's everybody doing? Hope you're having a good week, and thanks again for joining us on this wonderful afternoon, and thanks to CCS for hosting me in this awesome painting class. I really appreciate it. Any questions, make sure you write them into the chat for the IT communicators to Ken. All questions are welcome. Yes, please, do ask. It's an impossible scenario that I'm being so clear. Do ask. Yeah, and any feedback on the class, we would also appreciate it. You can send that to info at ChelseaClassicalStudio.com, or you can send that to Ken at Ken Goshen on Instagram, and or to us on Instagram as well. So all of your feedback would be appreciated. Yes, please do communicate with us as we are building this platform now, trying to really make sure that we give you, our valuable students, what you want and what you need. So any feedback from you is tremendously appreciated. So thanks in advance to anybody who's taking the time to contact us and letting us know what you're thinking about. So I'm discovering where this diamond shape really is. It's more to the left of what I thought. So I'm adjusting it, and you're noticing that as I'm adjusting it, I'm constantly rewarded by having selected to work with this medium. It's so easy to erase. It's a pleasure. And this is actually really important because it's very tempting to just jump directly into the face. But if you work on the face and it's in the wrong spot, ah, super frustrating. Like, can't even explain how annoying that is. But if you just take a few more minutes to make sure everything is correctly located in your composition, it's so worth it. Sounds boring, like, yeah, you're working on the jacket. No, no, no, no. I'm making it possible for me to work later on the face and not be worried about whether or not everything is in the right proportion or in the right location. Absolutely critical. And notice that as I'm drawing it, what I'm asking myself is not questions about jackets. I'm repeating this because it's very important. I'm asking myself questions about shapes. What is this shape really looking like? You know, what is the direction of this line? This was just a vector in geometry class. What would be the angle? If I continue the angle of this line, it meets the chin. You know, it's these things that you really need to consider. You're asking yourself, oh, if I continue this line, where does it go? And it hits the chin. Wonderful. If you're doing that and you're hitting here, then your angle is too steep. You know, you want to make sure that you ask yourself questions about the relationships of these different vectors, the other vectors in your composition to make sure that everything is falling beautifully into place. And this will be a pleasure to paint later because, you know, things will have already been set up. Starting to do this, I might need a smaller charcoal. With all due respect to this stick I'm using, this is a little too clumsy for working on the actual portrait. I'm going to push it as far as I can, but very soon I kind of feel like I'm going to hunt in my pencil box, in my charcoal box for a smaller charcoal. Again, it's done its job. Let's find a thinner one. How about this? Much better. So usually when you buy these willow charcoals, you can choose the thickness and some of the packages have assorted thicknesses. And it's nice to have both thick ones and thin ones. They're useful for different stages of the drawing, so I really recommend experimenting with both. Now here, when I'm working on the eye sockets, notice the angle. This eye socket's likely higher on the page than this. It's going to give us that perspective, that three-quarter view. Very, very important not to miss out on that. And what I'm looking for when I'm starting to work on the portrait is no different from what I was looking for when I was working on the outfit. I'm looking for the largest, most visible shapes that exist in my field of vision currently this reference. So the first division is this division between the generally light area and then this generally shadow area. And I'm looking at this shadow, again, as a geometric shape. You know, I want to make sure that if I were to make a collage, if I had to cut this out of a different paper and just, like, paste it, then I'm just imagining myself, like, going around with scissors and literally all around this shape to make sure that it's really correct, that it's really working. Now this can be adjusted slightly. There we go. It's these big shapes that really help, help, more than help, that really make it possible for you to capture somebody's likeness. Because the likeness is not in the features. If you look at the original painting, you're going to notice that the features, like the eyes, are all in shadow. They're barely visible. The mouth, definitely in shadow, barely visible. So how do we know who this is? You know, we know who this is because of these large shapes. And these shapes are modeling for us the three-dimensional structure of the head. Like, what we have going on here is this following phenomenon, right? We have this cube, right? And then light is coming from this direction, right? Actually, from the top, we're being really accurate. Coming from this direction, right? And then we have light stuff here, dark stuff here. We're building this three-dimensional structure, this shape of the head. And that is where the likeness really comes from, because we all have very, very different shapes of our head. So you're going to notice when you get used to thinking this way, that sometimes you can capture someone's likeness without even getting to the point of describing their features. You know, if you really describe correctly these relationships between the dark shapes and the light shapes, you're going to capture the majority of what's important about that individual's look. There has to be questions about that, because this is strange. I know it is. So if you do have questions, please type them into the chat. And letting you know, for the people who are asking about materials, that you can be painting along with me, but for now, we haven't really figured out how I can be both painting and looking at what you're doing. But I do give private lessons, and they're on my website under kengoshin.com slash lessons. And in a private lesson, I'm certainly able and happy to look at everything you're up to, everything you're doing, and make sure that you're following along not only theoretically, but practically. So for anybody interested in those, feel free to check out my website. So let's move along. Again, I'm looking at this. The nose is kind of tricky because half of it's in shadow, at least on the bottom. So it takes some attention to make sure that we do a good job with it. Okay, let me read this out. Yeah, go for it. What type of medium and how much is added to the first layer of paint? What type of medium and how much is added to the first layer of paint? Did you add white also? There is no paint yet. I'm not sure that I'm... Oh, you mean the imprimatura. Oh, okay, okay, okay, okay. So I did not add white, and you do not add medium. What you add is you add solvent, because a medium is going to dry on top of your surface, while a solvent is going to evaporate from your surface. So in the early layers, you really want to prioritize using a solvent and not a medium. Examples of solvents, we have some CCS good examples, oil of spike lavender, turpentine, things like that. All those are good options for staining your paper or your canvas before you start working. And next question, I'm just going to read it out loud. When do you know when to take the next step in your first stages? If some shapes and forms are ambiguous, should we try to assess that? That's an excellent, excellent question. So the answer to that is always, it's different every painting, but a good cue for not pushing the step any further. For example, now, I know there's problems with the nose. But I know I can't solve them, not because I don't know how to draw, but because this medium is too clumsy. The next medium I'm going to be using, whether it's like a finer drawing tool, or a brush, is going to enable me to draw this area of the nose much more accurately. So it becomes kind of redundant for me to try to solve all these problems at this layer, when I could be solving them more easily in the next layer. So the answer is kind of like, you want to move on when you know that the problems you'd be solving with the current medium you're holding are better done in the next stage, and that now you're wasting your time. Did that answer the question? I will let you know what they say. Cool. And now, talking about that, is actually bringing to mind the opportunity and the option of actually changing to a more, how to say, refinement-friendly version of this medium. I'm contemplating it, because I do have charcoal pencils, which are going to enable me to be a lot more accurate in what I'm doing now. But the downside is, as you can already guess, they're much more annoying to erase. But right now my calculus is kind of changing, because I will obviously still be erasing, but I'm definitely not going to be erasing as much, because the majority of the composition is kind of in place. I'm just blocking out the darks right now, because I'm not going to want to do that with pencils. And I'm giving myself a few more minutes to think about whether or not I'm going to decide to take the step of telling the willow charcoal to go and rest and grab my pencil. I think it's going to happen very soon, because this willow charcoal, this is kind of as far as it can go. Once I was trying to articulate all the fine stuff here in the nose, it's really too clumsy for that. It just doesn't really deliver. And I'm not in the business of working hard to convince mediums to do stuff that they don't want to do. You know, it's always good to work with your medium and not against it. And it's okay if I use charcoal pencil and then they're a little bit slower and difficult to erase. It's much better now, because you know, I have everything. The figure is where it needs to be. Everything is roughly the size that it will end up being. And I'm not so nervous about, oh no, what if I put something in a terribly wrong spot, and then I'm going to need to make a big movement. That's less and less likely to happen the longer I spend on it. What I was doing now with my finger is not smudging, but sometimes when you work on a paper that's not as absorbent as this paper, you can actually erase by dabbing with your finger. The charcoal just sticks to your to your finger and lifts right off. And I have that habit, but on this paper it doesn't really want to do that. I feel like what I'm going to do here in the middle ground, instead of switching to a dark charcoal paper pencil, I might supplement with a white charcoal pencil. So that will allow me to work in a more refined way on my light shapes without sacrificing the ability to make rapid changes to the darks. So that might be a good middle ground for us to adopt. Getting the shape of the back of the head to be a little bit better. And right now, how wide should it really be? This is really going to be much more easy when I have a brush. I'm going to erase this line now. It's served its purpose. I hope nobody's going to miss... well, I'm going to leave this now for now. It's kind of cute. Now let's see what a kneadable eraser does in terms of our ability to make more complex shapes happen here. Kneadable eraser is slower than the Chamis, but I can, as you can see, sculpt it to a point and really kind of get much more accurate with what I'm doing. Not being so impressive, but definitely easier than with the Chamis. So this is a kind of a general thing about the process that you're going to be noticing, and this is true for almost everything in art. You start fast, you start big, you start bold, and as the process continues, this is going to happen with layers again and again, things slow down because you can't maintain this high pace forever and hope to arrive at very accurate results. At some point, you know, things have to slow down in order for them to become more nuanced, more complex. Start with a lot of movement and finish with a lot of finesse. You want to start as like a sprinter and finish as a ballet dancer. 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 kengoshen.com slash lessons. See you next time!