FAST Oil Painting Tips to Loosen Up Your Brushwork

Welcome back to the studio. If you have ever found yourself staring at your canvas, frustrated by how tight and controlled your brushwork feels, know that you're not alone. Many painters, even with years of experience, hit this wall, where every stroke feels too labored. And it's like with every brushstroke, you are stripping the joy out of painting. But today, we're going So I'm going to share five simple techniques to help you loosen up your brushwork right away so that you can create paintings that feel fluid and expressive, like the one I have here, or like the works of your favorite painter, maybe John Singer Sargent, Zorn, Sorolla. So make sure you stick around to the end as well, because I'm going to be showing you how to paint wet into wet without creating muddy chaos. Let's dive in. So my very first tip, one of the easiest ways to instantly loosen up your brushwork is to use a brush that feels just too big for what you're painting. So it forces you to let go of the control that's holding you back. Suddenly painting becomes about broad, expressive gestures, allowing you to truly enjoy the process instead of really nitpicking over finicky details. So if you're used to painting with little brushes like this, where you can barely even see the tip of this brush when I hold it up to the camera, know that this is probably playing a role in how tightly you're painting right now. And if you were to make just a simple adjustment to painting with something a little bit larger, something that feels just one size beyond what you think is the largest size for painting that particular area, I think you'll be really surprised by the breakthrough that follows. Oftentimes our painting technique actually follows our tools. If you handed me this tiny detail brush and you said make an entire painting with it, you can absolutely bet that I would create something full of tiny details and I would paint it in a really finicky, fussy sort of way. Whereas if you gave me like a hardware store brush or just, you know, a bigger regular paintbrush like this one, suddenly you would probably see really sweeping strokes of color and you would start to get the brushwork in the painting that you're actually going for. It's really freeing to see the larger picture take shape without obsessing over every tiny detail. And it definitely brings a new energy to your canvas. So just to recap, with a bigger brush, you're going to be focused on the big shapes, whether we're talking about big shapes of color or big shapes of value. And if those big shapes are working, the details will fall into place naturally. It might feel awkward at first, but that's exactly why it works. It keeps you from overthinking the small stuff. Another great trick to loosen up is actually to limit your palette. And so I'm not necessarily talking about a three color palette here or a Zorn palette. My favorite way to really help students to loosen up their brushwork is actually to take away color altogether if loosening up is a real struggle. And here's the reason. Anytime you have a full palette of color, like I have on my easel behind me, I think I must have, gosh, I see eight colors on this palette and it's not unusual for that number to go up to 11 or 12 for certain compositions. If I'm having to juggle that many colors that I'm mixing between, I'm just naturally going to have less mental bandwidth to think about my brushwork and my mark making. So one of the simplest adjustments that we can actually make to free up more of that brain space and let you practice looser brushwork more deliberately is to take color out of the equation. You see, the thing is we actually do have limited brain space to work on something. There's been really interesting research talking about how many items we can essentially juggle in our attention in any one time. And so we know that we don't have the infinite ability to juggle or multitask. And the reality is, is that painting is asking you to juggle a lot of different challenges simultaneously. You're thinking about what brush to use, what colors to mix, what shape you're trying to make. How are you going to lay down that brush to get the right mark? Does this look like the person you're trying to paint? Is the value too light or too dark? And the list goes on. And so if we can take away any of these variables, we actually free up more of our attention for the task at hand. And if you're watching this video, the task at hand is probably loosening up. If you limit your palette to just black and white for a few paintings, and you really focus on the brushwork, I think you'll be really surprised by what you can accomplish just by removing all of the choices that come with having a full palette. And you might be thinking to yourself, well, I have like 14 different colors on my palette. What if I just keep it in color, but I, you know, chop that list of pigments that I have on the palette down to four colors. This could potentially save you time. But the reality is, is that when you're mixing and matching color, there's really three decisions you're having to keep in mind any given time. You're having to think about the value of what you're mixing. So how light or dark it is, you're having to juggle the hue, or, you know, is this more blue? Is it more purple? Is it more red? And you're having to juggle the chroma or the saturation, basically the intensity of that color, you know, is it more of a grayish purple? Or is it a really like bright neon purple? And so even when we use a limited palette, like a Zorn palette, we're naturally going to be asking ourselves all three of these questions. Whereas if we intentionally take hue and chroma out of the mix by just working in value by just having black and white on our canvas, we much more effectively free up more brain space. So I would highly recommend starting with value only if you really want to focus concerted effort on loosening up the brushwork. All right, next, if you find yourself overworking your brush strokes, try holding your brush at the end of the handle, rather than holding it like a pencil, you'll lose some control, but that's actually a good thing. So holding the brush this way actually forces you to make broader, more expressive marks. Because by definition, you're not going to paint from the wrist or from the hand, if you're holding the brush back here, you're actually going to be much more likely to paint from your shoulder. And as you can see, the difference between what happens if I have the brush down here, and I'm like using my wrist, much smaller, fussier shapes, whereas if I hold it back here, and I think about using my entire arm from the shoulder, I get these big sweeping arcs. And that's how you can get those really broad, expressive marks, you're more focused on the big picture, rather than getting stuck in the details. This subtle change really helps you to create those loose painterly strokes that can transform your work. And this tip really goes hand in hand with my next one, which is that if you're painting sitting down, or if you're working from a photo, it's really easy to get caught up in those details in this situation. So instead, try standing up while you paint. And if you can paint from life, this combined with really holding your brush at the back of the handle, it creates this really lovely constellation of effects. So because you are standing, it is much more natural for you to back up and get a little bit of distance on the subject and take in the big picture of the subject. Same thing is true for how you're taking in the actual painting. So if you are to back up, you're much more likely to see the big picture of what's working and what's not and actually go back and focus on the big shapes, the big, bold brush marks that you have to adjust, rather than really getting sucked into the very small details. And of course, if you're holding the brush back here, and you are painting with your whole arm extended, naturally, you're just going to make your marks were a little bit more of a distance, which is just going to reinforce this whole effect where you're encouraged to get more distance on the image, step back a little bit further and squint. One of the biggest things that I see with my students is that whenever they submit a piece for my feedback, I always like to see their painting side by side with a photo of their reference. Even if they were painting from life, I need to know what they were painting from. And I asked them to be very particular about how they share that reference. And so they always share them side by side with the same cropping. And what that means is that by the time they send them over to me, they get this little thumbnail preview of both their painting and the reference. And inevitably, as soon as we're actually having a conversation about their work in thumbnail, they can say, Oh, well, now I see that the eyeline is off, or I painted the face too long, or the background value just still isn't quite right. What I find so funny about this is that they were so eager to get my expert eye on this piece. But typically, what they see is absolutely correct. And it's the exact thing that I would comment on. And so I always tell them, you're going to get your skills stronger, when you can recognize the same things that need fixing, and you know how to fix them the exact same way I would recognize them and suggest that you fix them. And so you're going to learn that much faster when you start to catch these things for yourself. And the fact that you can already do that really predictably, by just getting the zoomed out thumbnail view of both your painting and the reference, it gives us the recipe. You know, you can absolutely have these two small zoomed out images of your painting and then your reference side by side. And you don't have to wait for me to tell you what's wrong, you're going to be able to catch it yourself and correct it on your own just the way your favorite professionals would. And inevitably, when they put this to work, it actually does its job, you know, they're able to really catch what's going on that much more quickly. And what's great about these last few tips that I shared is that when you paint standing up, when you are working from life, and when you're holding the brush at the back of the handle and naturally getting a little bit more distance, you are setting yourself up to get that zoomed out big picture thumbnail view of your painting and your reference all the time while you're painting. So you might not even need to take that thumbnail image of what you're seeing. This means that you are typically going to paint the big picture, you're going to get the big broad strokes more accurately earlier on in the painting. And this is going to set you up for a more accurate piece with higher realism without sacrificing the looseness. In fact, it's probably going to encourage you to get the exact looseness that you want. And I want to quickly elaborate just a little bit on painting from life, because I can make an entire video about the benefits of painting from life. And you've probably heard a lot of these benefits before, but it is worth just enumerating exactly why this added step in the process can make a really outsized impact. So what happens when you are working from life is typically you can perceive much less detail than you can when you're working from a photograph. So the big shapes and the big values really become your focus and the tiny details actually really fall away. I don't have a particularly strong prescription on my glasses, like I can recognize somebody from across the room, but I would have trouble maybe discerning like their facial expression from across a room. So what I actually really like to do based on the strength of my prescription is that when I work from life, I will often simply take my glasses off for the overwhelming majority of that painting from life session. And I really try and get comfortable working off of an image that is a little bit fuzzy. Typically, this really means that I'm only seeing those big shapes of color and value. And only at the very end, while I put my glasses back on, and I will look for the exact nuances of a tiny little highlight, or, you know, exactly what are some of the finer details on the face that I want to capture, it's really going to put a bow on all of the realism. I guess another way to say that is that at the very end, when I can see just just a few different little accents, it usually bumps the realism up so that I strike that ideal balance of looseness and realism that we're talking about here today. All right, and my last tip is honestly, a game changer. So instead of letting yourself paint until you feel the painting is done, which is often a real recipe for tightening up, I want to issue you a challenge on a painting where you really want to loosen up rather than simply allowing yourself to paint until it's finished, which is a recipe for really overworking and leaning into perfectionism to try and get all those tiny details right. Instead, I would challenge you to count the number of brushstrokes that you use in a given painting. Technically, I would say the objective of this exercise is to limit your brushstrokes, but I'm not going to lie, that number that you're trying to limit your painting to, it's really arbitrary. It genuinely depends on the painting. So a hundred brushstroke challenge might be more than enough for a landscape painting, but it might be woefully inadequate for a complex still life. So instead of just giving you some arbitrary number to follow, what I would say is every time you put down a mark, count it and see how many marks you actually have to take to get the image that you want. What happens when you do this is you're actively thinking about making every mark count, and you're going to be less likely to walk up to the canvas, put down a little mark, and then kind of noodle on it because quickly that can go from one brushstroke to 20. Instead, if you walk up with your big brush, you think about what mark you're going to make, you put it down, and then you back up, and you think about what is the next mark that I can make that's really going to count the most, chances are you're going to start to learn very quickly how to really stay efficient with the marks that you put down. Now, this might feel a little bit cumbersome at first to kind of arbitrarily stop yourself before and after every mark to make sure that you have a plan and that you're not just noodling, but over time, thinking more strategically about your brush marks, and they will start to come more intuitively. So every brushstroke becomes more purposeful, and you stop fussing over small unnecessary details. This exercise really sharpens your ability to convey more with less, a skill that's going to transform how you approach every canvas, much like the masters you admire. One of my students actually told me that he turned this into a bit of a game. So what he did was he didn't necessarily set a starting goal for the number of brushstrokes that he would take, but instead he was just mindful of counting what those brushstrokes were. He would try to limit them as much as he could, and he wouldn't overthink it too much either. And then the next time he would sit down to paint, he would take this one step further and challenge himself, assuming that the painting was similar in nature. He was painting portraits, so they probably were. He would challenge himself to get like just one brushstroke fewer. You know, can he just get that much more efficient? And what he shared with me was that this was actually really game-changing for him, because he might not have been really sensitive to the improvements he was making, painting after painting, but he couldn't deny the change in the numbers. So what would happen was that, you know, he might go into his studio five different times and make five different paintings throughout the course of the week, and if he held those paintings up next to one another and hadn't been mindful of how he was approaching the brushwork, he might not have really been sensitive to any growth between the first painting and the fifth painting. But because he was actively being mindful of how many brushstrokes he was putting down, he could say, hey, this took me 250, and by the end of the week I was only making 150. And the quality is really consistent throughout, so clearly I am learning how to put down the marks way more efficiently than I was before. It was such an easy way to gather a data point that would have entirely gotten lost before, and it turned out that that data point was really genuinely encouraging for him. And it ultimately made a really big difference in terms of him being able to recognize his own growth and feed into more of that momentum. All right, and as promised, here is a bonus tip for painting wet into wet without making a muddy mess. So the trick I'm going to share is, first of all, you need to put out plenty of paint on your palette, and then you need to put plenty of paint on your brush. So one of the biggest things that happens when painters are accidentally making a mess painting wet into wet is they're holding the brush too close, they're using too little paint, and the result is that they like really carve that brush into the existing paint layer, and it forces the paint that's on the brush to blend in to the paint that's underneath. And so instead, what we want to do is we want to lay the brush down onto the canvas as gently as we can, and we want to do it with the brush on its side. So we're really letting the paint glide off of the brush onto the paint layer. This technique keeps your brush strokes clean, and it preserves distinct colors and shapes that you're working with. So it's perfect for keeping your painting loose and lively without the risk of everything turning into a muddy blur. So by trying out these five techniques, you're going to be well on your way to loosening up your brushwork and creating more expressive, dynamic paintings. If you're finding it difficult to implement these changes, or if you want more guidance to take your work to the next level of looseness, I have a free masterclass where we deep dive into unlocking painterly expression. Check out the link in the description below for that masterclass, and let me know in the comments which tip you are most excited to try. And until next time, happy painting.