The Renaissance SECRET That Makes Portrait Painting A Lot EASIER

Every beginner knows this frustration. You make a preparation drawing, you draw your outlines carefully, transfer them to the canvas and start applying paint, but, catastrophe, the lines slowly start to disappear, covered by the paint of course. It's like losing your safety net. So where do you go from here ? Do you cling to the line and risk turning your portrait into something cartoonish ? Or do you let it go and risk losing the likeness entirely We need a genius solution and thankfully we have it with Leonardo da Vinci's process. Instead of heavy paint that buries the drawing, he began with extremely thin layers, almost like a tinted veil, just enough to merge the line into the shadows without destroying it. The outline doesn't disappear suddenly, it transforms, it dissolves gradually, carefully, slowly. In this video, I'll show you with Leonardo's brilliant technique how you can preserve accuracy with your outline while moving beyond the outline. And more importantly, I'll demonstrate how you can practice this same approach in your own work, step by step. And by the end, you'll understand why Leonardo could say that painting is simply drawing continued by other means. To dive into the genius process of Da Vinci, we first need to understand that for the Italian master, painting is the natural evolution of drawing. And as he wrote himself, the student who is the source of making great proficiency in the art of imitating the works of nature should not only learn the shape of figures or other objects and be able to delineate them with truth and precision, but he must also accompany them with their proper lights and shadows. This is the painter's challenge. Lines must give way to form. The outline exists in the preparation, but in the final work, it naturally dissolves into soft gradations of light and shadow. And the secret that Leonardo teaches us through his works and writings is that drawing and painting are essentially the same thing. Look at this painting, Lady with an Hermit. It feels very linear, almost like a painted drawing. You could easily follow the subtle curves of this contour. The limits of the figure is pretty clear here. It's gracious. It's elegant. This beautiful sinuous line is what makes this painting so beautiful. But when you take a closer look, where is the line actually? There isn't one. Her cheek curves into shadow seamlessly. The transition is so subtle that you can't tell where the light stops and where the shadow begins. Leonardo shows us that you can keep the presence of the line while painting the roundness of the form. So how did he do that? And is this something that you can use in your own paintings? Well, you'd be happy to know that the response to the second question is yes. And it is actually easier than you think. By the way, if you'd like to go deeper with this kind of study, I run a community called the Atelier of Figurative Arts where I share weekly exclusive content, master resources like this one, real-time demos, and you can even send me some of your assignments for personalized feedback and critique. It's like an online art academy that you can do on your own time and it helps the channel. So if you're interested, check the links in the description below. Leonardo always insisted that drawing was the foundation of everything. Without it, there is no painting. Two things demand the principal attention of a good painter, he wrote. One is the exact outline and shape of the figure. The other, the true expression of what passes in the mind of that figure. This means that your outlines, your sketches, your preparation, drawing, they matter. They give you precision and structure. But Leonardo never saw drawing as the end goal. Instead, he treated it as the scaffolding on which the painting is built. It's there to train your eye to see the truth of the form, but eventually, you must allow the paint to take over and the lines have to vanish. Technically, what does this mean for you as a painter? It means that you need to find ways to make the covering of the outline progressive and controlled. Instead of brutally hiding every line with thick paint, you want to go slowly and take your time to cover the lines using several layers instead of one. So here is our canvas. We have transferred the outline and we are ready to paint. Now, we're going to paint the imprimatura or underpainting and instead of painting it with a thick grisaille layer, we're going to proceed slowly and lightly. To paint while preserving the accuracy of the line, we're going to start with an underpainting technique that's halfway between drawing and painting. We're going to use a brush and palette as normal, but we're not going to mix a conventional opaque layer of paint. We're going to use a very, very small quantity of paint and spread it in a semi-opaque manner so at the end of this underpainting, the line remains somewhat visible through the paint. We won't leave it like that forever. It's just the underpainting, don't worry. But what we want to do is build the form slowly and lightly with multiple thin paint layers. The goal is that for the underpainting, we can still see the line somewhat. It's not fully hidden by the very first layer of paint. The idea is to build the entire painting slowly with multiple thin paint layers. Thick over thin. Maybe you've heard about this classical oil painting rule and it works perfectly for what we are trying to achieve here. Preserve the lines for as long as possible so that we don't get lost and mess up our likeness early on in the process. The thick over thin rule teaches us that each new layer can be slightly thicker than the previous one, so you can start with very thin and lean layers in the underpainting. Layers so thin that the line is still somewhat visible for the next 2-3 passages. Then, progressively, you build up the thickness to end up with a finished painting that doesn't have any traces of the outline anymore. It's very much like a safety net. You want to get rid of it, but progressively. Your first layer, the underpainting and the first painting are very thin and semi-transparent or semi-opaque, so you can still hold on to the outline for a little while through transparency. Just enough time to make sure that the whole subject is moving in the right direction. And as you feel more comfortable during the first or the second painting, you can start to fully cover the line until it disappears entirely. It's a gradual evolution and ultimately, the lines should naturally vanish like smoke. Here's the paradox with da Vinci. Line is essential, but in a finished painting, you're not supposed to see it. Leonardo even warns us that we should not leave any lines visible in the final painting. Take care that the shadows and the lights be united or lost into each other without any hard strokes or lines. That's the magic of his sfumato. Look at the lady's face. Where is the edge of the cheek? Or the contour of the nose? The line has dissolved into air, into atmosphere. The form is still precise, but it's wrapped in light. And this is the painter's challenge exemplified. Keep the clarity of the drawing alive without letting the line harden into something dead. Practically speaking, to paint this kind of very light underpainting, what we do is we don't let the paint mix on the palette. We simply take some raw umber to create what I call the dark side of the painting and some white to create what I call the light side. And the thing is that we don't let them blend on the palette. We're simply going to apply them separately on the canvas, very thinly and lightly, as if it was a drawing. And really, it is just halfway between drawing and painting at this stage. It's just a very gradual transition, just between the drawing of the outline and the final painting. This is an in-between stage, halfway between drawing and painting, very much like drawing with paint. We are just going to push the pigments around without adding more. And we use the color of the background underpainting to leave open spots where needed. Some visible raw canvas can be visible here and there. We don't need to fill up everything as we do with a normal opaque layer. See, we don't need to mix a gray on the palette. We can simply apply the raw umber lightly and spread it to make it semi-opaque, which is going to make it appear lighter because you can see some of the canvas underneath. And we can do the same for the white. You can apply it almost pure first and then simply take a stiff hug bristle brush to spread it and blend it directly on the canvas until it gets just the right value. To preserve the drawing, our safety net, we go slowly when we reach an important line and we make the paint slightly lighter in areas where we have to keep a line visible so that we can keep our edges for as long as we need them. Keep in mind that eventually we'll cover everything entirely, but for the initial stages, if the line helps you, you can allow yourself to keep it for a little while. Only for the first stages, it's a multi-layer process, so we have time to hide them later. The one mistake you want to avoid is to try to artificially keep something sharp in the final layer. Leonardo insisted on the necessity of going around the entire subject and removing all traces of the boundaries of the objects. In other words, lines don't exist outside of our brain, so forget about outlining the ridge of the nose, the separation between the neck and the jaw, or things of that nature. And it's also an aesthetic choice. Removing harsh lines matter not only for realism, but also for grace and beauty. You must not mark any muscles with hardness of line, but let the soft light glide upon them and terminate imperceptibly in delightful shadows. From this will arise grace and beauty to the face. So what happens when you've covered your outline with paint? If you've only learned to depend on your safety net for the entire painting, of course at some point you will probably panic because you'll lose the likeness. But if you have practiced both drawing and painting, and move gradually from one to the next, the transition feels natural and it happens just like that. You don't lose the likeness because you have learned to see in both ways. First see with the contour, and next with the lights and the shadows. And Da Vinci teaches us that painting is simply drawing continued by other means. Leonardo knew that drawing and painting are inseparable, and if you really want to paint at the highest level, you have to treat them that way. If you want to learn more about Da Vinci, you can click here. I'll see you in the next one, and as always, my friends, joy and inspiration to you. Bye.