Oil & Acrylic Painting Process | Paint with Me *Art Nouveau Style*

Friends, it has been a while. Welcome back and mainly welcome back to me because it has been a long time. I have missed doing the content but as you know life is busy and there is no excuse, it's just it got got in the way and I have been working on my art in the background which is why I thought I would put something out to just share some content with you and let you know that I am still going here. Definitely not as active as I have been in the past through social media but just yeah just wanted to let you know that I'm still working on my craft and trying new things in the art realm. So today's video is just to catch up on that and reveal some of the process of this piece that I have just finished that I'm quite happy with. There's obviously things I would change because that is me but I'll talk to you about that throughout the video. So get comfy and grab a cuppa and let's have a chat. So this piece has been a long time coming. It's something I've wanted to work on for quite some time since I really became into the Art Nouveau style a few years ago when we started working on those art on cue pieces if you've been around the channel for a while. So you might remember that I researched into Art Nouveau in one of my bullet journal explorations and discovered Art Nouveau again and just felt reinvigorated. I've just always loved the style so I have been doing several pieces over the years including that style and I've been wanting to work on a painting that incorporates perhaps my realistic painting style with some more decorative elements and so that's basically what I wanted to work on. So that was my brief in my mind was I wanted it to be a portrait and I wanted to include all those decorative elements and then so I just started sketching some options out and thinking about what I wanted to portray throughout the piece as well. At the time I was sketching I remember thinking a lot about global warming and you know how how you can help how does one individual help in such a huge global topic problem and it was just really like I wanted to express myself but I don't know any other way how and I don't know how to help but all I can do is just express how I feel and that is that we need to look after our environment because it will save us and so it's quite obvious what I'm getting at here. I've got a girl in the middle of the piece holding on for dear life to the nature around her. The colour choices are all very deliberate. I've gone for a lot of green cool greens on the outside and it all moves in towards this fiery centre where she is incredibly hot. I've got a little bit of magic happening in there by the end around the eucalyptus that she's holding on to. I've tried to keep in mind my local flora so there's a lot of Australian plants shown in the piece as well and then as I went through the sketching process and designing the actual piece I just kept all of that in mind. I do like to think that with art there's more than the artist's goal of what they're trying to say with the piece it's about the viewer as well so I do hope that other people take what they want from the piece and they might pick up something different that I didn't intend on putting in there or it might just be a pretty picture to the viewer like I don't really mind. What's important is that I am creating it and it's getting out what was inside of me when I wanted to describe this feeling that I have towards looking up to the planet. I'm going through a massive phase at the moment where I'm obsessed with tiny homes and just being off-grid and you know this modern world is annoying me so I have definitely put some of those elements into creating this piece just trying to step away from digital life and go back to nature and go back to the earth just try and express that. So yeah that's where the concept is coming from and now I'll talk to you a bit about the process of how I created it. So of course beginning any piece with a cup of tea and preparing the art space and I was a couple of days in by this point but here's a little look at how messy the studio gets as I'm working. That's actually one of the cleaner days. The first part for this painting was I knew I wanted to do an oil painting portrait to practice my oil painting skills but the elements around it I wanted it to dry quickly and I wanted to be able to work fast so I went to my good old faithful acrylics for that. So anything on the outside of this piece is done in acrylic paint and was you know much easier to work with for me because I'm so used to it but I did having said that try to paint differently. Like I'm so used to blending everything out and using a more of a rounded brush for most of my painting but I do love the effect that a flat brush gives because it makes you remember that this is a painting and I wanted to see the strokes in all of these elements on the outside especially in this first corner it's always the first part is the one that you kind of come back to a lot and with this first corner of eucalyptus leaves I just wanted to try and get it as much reflecting a design feel as I could so I didn't I wasn't concerned with realism in this part I just kind of wanted to express the leaves and plants themselves and then as I progress naturally the detail just happens to come so I still wish I had pulled back on the detail in this part but I do like I do like how it turned out as well so it's it's a real challenge that I face I I want to be loose with things and with my work but it's like my hands and my brain won't let me and it just keeps working until there's a fair bit of realism so it's a it's not a bad struggle to have but it it kind of bothers me so I just worked my way through the four corner elements of the piece using washi tape as a marker for me to make sure I get some clean crisp edges I loved that this washi tape in particular went with my color theme that was quite satisfying and it's also really satisfying to watch how thick the paint goes on and it just makes me remember the process a little bit it's nice to have these videos as a record to look back at for me personally and hopefully it's enjoyable for you guys to watch I love watching artists on YouTube do their paintings it's just so satisfying and relaxing so I hope you get some of that from this that's why I've decided I probably won't spend the whole video chatting away because maybe you'd like to see it in some silence or at least in some nice music that I'll put behind it but yeah these next corners that I work on on the painting are a lot more Art Nouveau typical they're a lot more graphic and about the shapes and patterns on leaves rather than a realistic look at them so this was definitely more of the feeling I was trying to go for initially or I had in my brain so yeah these into the actual portrait which is always a little bit of this on scary side when you've already worked so much on the background you just pray that the portrait turns out well so as I said I'm using oils to create the portrait part of this piece and it also gives you that little bit of freedom because you know you've got more drying time to work in with the color but having said that I did want to try my hand at being a little bit more expressive with the way I placed the paint and it worked for the first few layers but by the end I had smoothed it out and it's quite realistic by the end still not to a point where I would call it hyper realistic by no means but it works for the piece and it is you know it is my creation I can't I can't be anybody else it's just how my art tends to get smoothed out and I just have to accept it or keep practicing to get looser with those strokes so that's what I'm going to keep doing so as you can tell this is the only issue I have with this piece I think I'm really happy with the colors and it expresses what I wanted to express but it's just about the achieving a little bit more of a looser portrait is what I would aim to do next time but yeah I'm going to leave you now with watching the rest of the process and hopefully it's enjoyable for you and I'm glad to have you back and I'm glad to have finally created something for the channel again thank you so much for watching and for hanging in there with me and I hope you can still enjoy some of the other content on my channel even though it's not coming as often but I really appreciate you I hope you're doing well out there in the world wherever you are sending lots of love out to you all please be kind to the planet be kind to others and yourself and I look forward to seeing you in another video in the future thank you bye