Ken Goshen en Atelier Mesones dìa 2, parte 1: ¿cómo lograr una pintura increíble?

Now, yesterday we did some charcoal drawing and everybody has a nice layout for their design. We're super excited to move towards painting it and what we're going to do today is we're going to pass through a stage called underpainting. The underpainting stage, you can think of like a kind of bridge. A bridge between painting in color, full color, and drawing. What's the difference between painting and drawing? These are things that, you know, you don't have to necessarily agree with, but when I come across this kind of thing, I need a definition. Otherwise, I can't sleep. So, my definition for the difference between is that in drawing, all the variation happens on the surface. In painting, the variation happens outside of it. If I can mix my colors separately, if I have a time of my process where I'm not making changes on the surface itself, but rather on a third-party agent, using this separate tool, that changes the action. When I draw, think about your choreography, right? You examine, apply, judge, but your contact is always with the piece. A painter spends 50% of the time here. Now, people don't think about this, and because they don't think about this, and because they all come from some kind of background in drawing, the biggest mistakes that amateur painters make stem from spending too much time on there and not enough time here, okay? And that's a big problem, because coming from a background of drawing, we all know that I can take the paint and manipulate it on the surface as well. But the paint, the technology, doesn't appreciate that, because all paint really is, we said, glue with a colorful powder. That's all it is. You put that stuff on there, it looks delicious. You start messing with it, starts looking really bad. You can put it on, deal with the edges a tiny amount, and leave it. That's the right way to paint. If you're messing with your paint too much, you're gonna make something that, at best, will look correct, but will not look beautiful. If you want to preserve the luminosity in an optimal situation, you put every mark down when it's wet, and you let the painting dry. You come back the next day, everything is dry, you can work again. Mix new colors, put them down when they're wet, don't overwork them, let them be. So I want colors to be mixed so perfectly that when you touch the painting, it works. If by the end of this workshop, you just mix five colors, but they're perfect, and you've painted a little square of a shoulder, I'm okay with it. Because I'm here to teach you, and I don't really care what happens to all these paintings. And if I was really radical, which maybe will happen in 15 years, at the end of this, I would burn all these paintings. Because they don't matter. These paintings are your laboratory to learn new skills and improve as painters. And if we obsess over loving these paintings and wanting them to be beautiful, this comes at the expense of the skills that we can purchase over the past, over the next two days, which are going to be way more valuable. Because these skills are going to produce all the beautiful paintings that we could make in the future, right? But fixating on making this painting beautiful so that we can show our family is a bad strategy. It's a bad strategy. So use these paintings as a laboratory for growth. What I'm planning to do is I would like to do what we call an underpainting. First half of the day, and then second half of the day, I'm going to do a quick color explanation. And then we're going to do a lot of mixing on our palettes. Now I'm going to explain what an underpainting is, followed by questions. So pay attention. An underpainting, similar to what we've done yesterday, is a way of mapping the design. Further, we can improve on the map. Something with bad proportions, bad values, and bad edges could still be a beautiful painting if it has good design. And design is shapes, right? Proportions is a subset of the larger issue of shapes. It's the shapes that make the figure look correct. That's a small amount of the shapes that we deal with. Proportions don't include the shape of the background. Proportions don't include all the shapes of the frame, right? The shape of the frame is not proportions because it doesn't deal with the figure. So when I say shape, I include proportions in that, but I'm talking more holistically about how we take a two-dimensional surface and carve it up so that it's interesting to look at. So that was our goal yesterday, to focus on the shapes. We did a little bit of values, but in a more binary way. We have the darks, the lights, that's pretty much it. When we use paint in order to make our map more sophisticated, we can start exploring values a little bit deeper. If I only have one pigment, I'm not making variations on the palette. I am making variations by adding more or less of a material. More umber, darker. Less umber, lighter. That's drawing. In drawing, you have a perfect correlation between amount of stuff, quantity of material, and value impact. They are inseparable. I can't put a little umber and make it dark. Doesn't work, right? That means it's drawing. We're going to be drawing in paint, okay? This, in complete separation with what we're going to be able to do once we actually start mixing on the palette. Because once we start mixing on the palette, I can create my value differences and then decide how much I want to put. I can mix a color perfectly and decide, for my design, I want to put it thin. For my design, I want to put it thick. For my design, I want to put a texture. For my design, I want to put it smooth. And it's not going to influence not the values, not the color. So this is the point where we step from drawing into painting. It doesn't have anything to do with liquids, doesn't have anything to do with all those things. It has to do with whether or not I can disassociate and detach the properties of value or color impact from amount of stuff applied to surface. And then this points to a concern that I have with a lot of how, um, is that they're still in that drawing subset, right? They are like, they mix a color, it's imperfect, but by working with transparency, if you're watching, you may know what I'm talking about. By working with transparencies, they adjust the values and the colors and everything in how they spread the paint around or how they put some liquid in it and create some variations, right? That's not the basis of painting. That's called drawing with color or drawing with paint, but it's not painting. It's not painting. You could add that as a decorative effect or as some specialized techniques like glazing, which are a tiny subset of the important techniques that would be like 15% and that 15% were closing in a box. They are not important. They are not the key. The key is to understand that when you draw, you create variations on the surface by adding more or less of one or a few pigments. But the quantity is what matters. When I work with charcoal and white chalk, more white chalk, lighter, more charcoal, darker. When I paint, that's not what I'm doing. When I paint, I make all my variations perfectly on this third party agent. And then I have the liberty and the responsibility to determine how much of any particular agent I need on my painting to make my design successful. So I'm going to start with a demo of the underpainting technique. And remember, I want to be done with this before lunch. Done. Okay. We have in our underpainting, it's useful to have what we're talking about. First and foremost is we're trying to expand our value range. What will Sienna give us? Less than charcoal. Why would we do it? It's light. Then also we're trying to create a foundation on which we can work with color. If we do something that has too much of a color note, too much of a color impact, it's going to stand in our way. We should optimally be using something dark and relatively neutral that we can use to expand our value range. Also, another very important property is that it needs to dry fast. But Sienna is okay for that. Sienna dries very fast. But the underpainting pigment that you choose, I've seen people do underpaintings with alizarin. It is a horrible idea. Alizarin doesn't dry for days. For days. It doesn't matter if you like crimson red. I like crimson red. But we are craftsmen. We're dealing with chemistry. If you get used to working with either burnt umber when you want it more neutral or raw umber when you want it more neutral or burnt umber when you want it a little bit more orange, this can take you 98% of the way to any painting you want. If you catch me over here and tell me, Ken, there's a subset of 1.5% of painters that do something really different for a really specific purpose, I could stand here for four hours and explain it. But because we're on the clock, I want to give you the techniques that are most applicable for the widest scope of projects. So to all the things that I'm telling you and advising you to do today, yes, there are exceptions. But focusing on the exceptions is like what people do late in their dorms in college. Yes, it's fun to talk about all the philosophy, but the meat and potatoes are here. Okay, that's the key. And notice that what I have here, it was difficult to create separation between these two values before. Okay, so here's what I'm discovering. This turpentine is very strong, so I need to use much less of it. And this will depend on the surface that you're using. Because I am using a surface that's very smooth, I may not even need the turpentine at all because it's very easy for me to spread the paint around and create the transparency even without the turpentine. And again, that's because my painting surface is super duper duper smooth. So for most of you, this is not going to be possible. So you're going to end up using more turpentine than me, and that's perfectly fine. Don't worry about it. Okay, so right now what I was able to do is I was able to create a value distinction that I could not do with the charcoal alone, right? I couldn't do it. And now it opens up the door for me to express more and to make my map better, more explanatory, more sophisticated. And I'm actually really pleased that I can do this without turpentine because it gives me more control. Turpentine is... it makes your paint really liquid, and by making your paint really liquid, it becomes harder to deal with. I want to block out the background because if I am to hope to start feeling the feeling of light over here, I need some contrast, right? So I'm starting with the things that I wasn't really able to do with the charcoal. And for this, I'm going to use some more turpentine. At this point in the game, I'm a little bit regretting that I chose to use the burnt umber and not the raw umber, especially because of the background color. But I'm going to stick by my decision because I don't want to switch pigment now and clean it and do a whole shabang. But for any of you, this is... I've tested the ground and I tend to think that perhaps the raw umber is a better choice, and that's why I am the guinea pig over here. Yeah, because for everything that's happening in the figure, I think both of them could work well, but for the background, I think the more neutral one will be easier. Are you working with straight lines? I'm not working with lines, that's a nice question. I'm working with shapes, right? I'm trying to look at what does this shape look like, and that is my guiding principle. I'm trying not to use lines, but if I were using lines, which is an okay thing to do, then yes, I would be using straight lines. I'm always using straight lines. And when I'm trying to create something that is more curvy looking, I don't curve my lines, I just put more straight lines in quick succession. Does that make sense? Yeah. If you look very close up at a series of straight lines, think about pixels, right? Every image you see in a computer is made from squares, no matter how round it looks like. It's always still squares, little squares, tiny squares. So, when you're trying to create a curve, think about it like that. You want tiny, tiny straight lines, but very specific straight lines. Curves are the enemies of precision, and my goal for this underpainting is to make it explode with light. That's what I want. I wasn't able to do this with the charcoal alone, because the charcoal is just not built for it, but with the paint, I'm definitely able to. And you're going to notice that if there is an area that I covered with turpentine, even a small amount of turpentine, like the background for example, when I come back to working on it and refining it, I don't need any more turpentine. It's enough to put it down once. If you continue to load up your pieces with more and more and more solvent, you're going to find yourself swimming in solvent, and that's not a pleasant way to swim. So, try to only use it when you have to. There's a thing that painters do when they are given a material, is they have this kind of faith in the supplies, and they're like, something's not working out, let me put more of this thing that I now have. And you just put more and more and more of it, and it doesn't lead us in positive directions at all. Now, you'll notice that I'm also taking this opportunity, when I can, to be more precise about my design. Usually, usually, what I do is I start my underpainting on my charcoal drawing without using fixative. When I don't use fixative, there's a downside and an upside. The downside is, whenever I touch an area, the paint is going to just completely disappear immediately, which means I have every opportunity to totally ruin all the accomplishments that I did the day before. The plus side is that, if something can be done better, I have an easier time correcting it, because I'm not going to have this charcoal design stuck on my surface. So, you ask me why this time I chose to use the fixative? It's because the majority of you did it. So, I don't want to be able to do things in a way that you guys are not, since it wouldn't be a fair demo. So, I'm just on your team in this case, but just a note on that, that I hope that this is not an endorsement, is what I'm trying to say. It's not an endorsement of always fixing your drawing, because I believe, since we have more abilities to control with a brush, we have better control. Generally, I prefer to let the charcoal drawing disappear, unless it's like a crazy charcoal drawing that I worked on for like a month, and then I'm like, okay, this is not worth risking. But in the majority of cases, especially if I only worked on the charcoal drawing for a day, I have faith that whatever I do with my brush is going to be better. So, now it starts to look like light, which is extremely encouraging. And so, I'm going to lock in the value of the figure as well. The figure needs to be darker than the background by a small margin. How do I decide what value goes where? And what the question suggests correctly, is that we are working with a hierarchy. So, I'm not concerned now that I'm working on the arm, if the value that ends up on my surface is the exact value I see in reality. That does not matter. What matters is that the relationship between the values as they start to emerge on my painting is correct. That this value is the darkest value. That this value is the second darkest value. That this value is the third darkest value. We are worried about the relationship between the values, not the values in of themselves. The values in of themselves do not matter. Do not matter. In this context, they do not. Only the relationship between them matters. And people who have a lot of experience with graphite pencil will know that very well. That a pencil drawing can look really excellent and very realistic, but it's never ever going to come close to looking at the values that we have in life. Pencil drawing just doesn't have the ability to go as dark as life looks. So, how do pencil artists manage to make things still look persuasive? Through relationships between values. Through designing their composition in a way that some values are darker than others and having faith in the viewers that it will make sense in the end, which it will. Yes, if you ask me what's more important, proportions or design, I would say design. But I don't think it's a choice that you have to make. I think you can have both. I don't think, I know you could have both. And I would advise you to get both. But if you could choose one, I would choose design. But what I'm trying to do is, I'm not trying to tell you which one to choose as much as I'm trying to tell you that if you get the design right at the beginning, you can add the, you can, you can figure out the proportions. But if you get, if you focus on the proportions first and then try to get a good design, forget it. Right? So, one of them, the fact that it's more important to me aesthetically is not important. And I'm not trying to convince you of my taste. What I'm trying to convince you that is correct 100% of the time is that if you are going for both, go for the design first. What is a painting? An arrangement of shapes and colors on a two-dimensional surface. Okay. What is a good painting? A good painting is a painting where that arrangement is emotionally compelling, visually compelling, expressive in some way, that the arrangement itself has something to say. It's not just, that's where it ended up on the canvas. Right? Now that's what I call design. You could call it composition. My issue with the word composition and how most people talk about it is they think composition equals crop. That's how I crop it. They would look at a whatever piece of photo, right? And I say, Oh, I'm going to compose it. And they crop the bottom. That's not composing. That's a tiny, tiny part of composing. Right? Composing. One of the main, main issues in composing is to make decisions that are about the shapes themselves. Learning to give stuff up. If they're not important for the design, include and emphasize things that are critical for the design. Those are more important than the crop. They work together with the crop. So if you're asking me, what is composition or what is design? It's yes, the crop is a part of it, but the idea of how these shapes are going to come together. For example, when we were talking yesterday about the yin and yang, this idea is not in the crop. The crop can support it. The crop can hurt it. The crop is a big important factor in it. But if that is our idea that we're trying to pursue, and I'm not telling you that you have to, but just as an example, because I brought everybody over to take a look at it. If my idea is to emphasize that yin and yang relationship, then as part of my composition, I will need to make decisions like make the eye simple, make the eye simple in order to build on my visual idea of the yin and yang is not a question of the crop. So the right way to think about supplies in general, and everybody should be listening to this is there is not one way to use supplies. There is, I'm trying to create a visual effect, and then I need to use the correct supplies that get me there in the correct conjunction. Meaning if this painting was done on a surface that was more absorbent, I would use more turpentine. If this painting was done on a surface that is more textured, I might have needed to use different brushes. You understand? So if I just try to make a list, this is the amount on this kind of thing, on this kind of thing, what you're going to do is you're going to do two things. Waste your time and get no results. What you want to be focused on is how does it look? What I need to do is I need to touch my canvas and see how does it behave. This canvas, as soon as I touch it with turpentine, starts to drip. I don't like the drip. So that means to me immediately, and my first move on the painting, I used a lot of turpentine. I put it on and I was like, this is not going to work. So I started using less. So what I'm trying to advise is be sensitive to how your surface behaves and does it do what you want it to do. Respond by making adjustments once you see the visual effect that's created. Okay, so now I have a kind of blocked out situation and I'm going to try to express a few things that I consider important that I couldn't really express with the charcoal alone. And I don't feel the need to use any more turpentine because the paint is moving around in a way that's easy to control. And that's what I'm going for. I'm going for does the paint, is the paint easy to control or not? And by control, I mean two things. Can I articulate different amounts when I need them? Make it darker, make it lighter, spread it around. If I can do that without turpentine, why would I ever use it? Because, you know, it's a toxic material. I'm not like enjoying it or anything. It just is here to serve a purpose. It's here to serve a purpose. And so if I don't need that purpose served anymore, the turpentine becomes less important. For example, if I'm going to try to work on this edge right now, I just dry my brush and I take the paint that's already here. And I can control my edge. On a different paper, that goes back to our question, maybe I wouldn't be able to do that, right? On a very textured surface where the paint is not sliding around as easily, maybe this would not be possible. So I'm not telling you something that is always true. In fact, I will never tell you anything that is always true when it comes to supplies. That's why my method of teaching focuses on the theory because the theory is always correct. The supplies are just there to make sure that we can put the theory into practice. What would happen if I touch the lights to my value range? Values disappear. My value range is going to get narrow, right? Because my paper is the lightest value that I have with this particular set of ingredients. So if I mess around with it, I'm going to be losing more values than I gain. So by not touching the lights and allowing them to glow, I am maximizing the amount of values that I'm going to have to work with in the process of this painting. But that depends on your subject or the painting you're going to do. For example, if you want to paint something that the light is more dark, you need to use more oil in that part. Never oil! Are you talking about turpentine? Yeah, or put some paint in the lightest part of the light. Let me think about that. I have to think about this because this is an extremely advanced question. You're telling me that in a particular case, you might want to have a narrow value range on purpose, right? That's the question. Yes. Oh, okay. So in that case, yes. But I would strongly advise against it because values are one of the key ways that we have to make our painting compelling and attractive. It's kind of like telling me, which I tried to do once, can you cook without salt? You can, but it's gonna be really hard. So I'm obsessed with health and things like that. So I tried for a few months to cook without salt and it's hard, super hard. Yes, you can paint a painting with purposefully limited values, but good luck. Good luck. Okay. Think very carefully before you limit yourself because the technology of painting is already pretty limited. We would be probably wisest to use everything at our disposal to make our painting successful. It would be almost like a show-off move that maybe a painting teacher would come here and tell you, you think you need 10 values to make a painting? I can do it in two. And probably I could get away with it, but that's all it's going to be. There's very few examples where you can see that the limited value range is actually justified conceptually. First one that comes to my mind is like Morandi. You know him? Giorgio Morandi? Yes. Morandi has very limited value ranges in his paintings. But even those limited value ranges are more high key. So it's not that he would dim his lights more so than he would just not go dark on the shadows, which I think is more legitimate because that's closer to what you do in graphite. It's easier for us to see, right? I want you to be able to see my painting and vision is almost equivalent to light, right? What is darkness? What is shadow? It's the absence of light. It's the absence of vision. So if you're telling me I'm going to sacrifice my lights, I'm going to tell you your painting is going to literally be less visible. Squinting, still applicable. Here what I'm seeing that's annoying me is that the difference seems bigger than it is when I look. So I'm going to go a little darker here. I don't want to draw too much attention here. So by not wanting to draw too much attention here and making this dark, I am still composing. This is still part of composition. It's still part of design, right? If I'm asking myself the question, I should be asking myself this question all throughout the process. All throughout the process, where do I want the attention of the viewer to go? And I'm controlling that by adjusting the contrast levels. When I reduce the contrast here, I'm drawing less attention here. When I increase the contrast here, I'm drawing more attention here. And this is part of composing. It's part of design. These are decisions that I'm, it's not that I'm making decisions that I'm not seeing there. I am seeing it there. The difference here is very small, but I'm making sure that I'm actually getting that from my supermarket, not just because of my loyalty to nature, but because I want, I think this is going to improve my design if people don't look over here. This is not a very interesting point. And in general, I don't want to draw any attention to the corner of my frame, right? But it doesn't mean that it has to be this way. Like if there wasn't that color of a wall behind her, there might've been more contrast there. And if there is more contrast there and I can't find a way around it, maybe my crop will be different. Maybe I would crop it so that this is not so dangerous. And so adjusting the crop, adjusting the values, adjusting the attention, adjusting the contrast, all of this is part of design. All of this is part of composition. Okay? Okay. Light next to dark attracts attention. Dark next to dark, easy to avoid. Like now that I've made this darker, this area doesn't attract all my attention. How did I know to do that? I stepped away from my painting and I asked myself, where is my eye going? I want my eye going here. And the eye was going here. I don't like that. Right? So when you are backing away from your painting, you ask, where am I looking? Where am I looking? Where do I want to be looking? You make the changes in order to make sure that the eye goes where you want it to go. If you stare at a shadow for five minutes, you're going to expand your pupil and see a lot of stuff happening there. If you stare at a light for five minutes, hold on. Your pupil's going to contract, let less light in. And then that beautiful glow that you saw at the beginning is not going to start to look like a glow anymore. You're going to start to see all this information, all this detail, all this, this, because your eye does. The eyes job is to adjust, to make you see the most amount of information. And so when you know this, you will understand that the eye actually will lead you in places that are not good for the painting necessarily, especially if you look directly at an area. So if I look directly at this, I'm going to start to see differences because that's what my eye does. When I look directly at something, all the differences open up biologically. I don't need to see to paint this, how it looks when I look at it. I need to paint this, how it looks when I look here, right? When I stare here, this stuff looks the same. If I look at it, if I look at this, this stuff looks the same. If I look at this, this is going to look very, very different. So be careful when you zoom into an area with your observation, you have to, when you're composing and designing, that's why I say squint. When you squint your eyes, you prevent this dynamic property of our eye and you keep it fixed on the broad vision of the whole. This broad vision of the whole matters a lot.